The Life’s Work of a Thought Leader
In interviews conducted before his untimely death, C.K. Prahalad — the sage of core competencies and the bottom of the pyramid — looked back on his career and talked about the way ideas evolve.
Coimbatore Krishnarao (C.K.) Prahalad would have celebrated his 69th birthday on August 8, 2010. He was one of the most influential and original strategic and management thinkers of the last 50 years. He was also a friend to strategy+business and, most significantly, a friend and mentor to management thinkers and practitioners all around the world — particularly in India, where he was born and educated, and in the United States, where he lived for most of his career until he passed away from a sudden lung illness on April 16.
Starting in 1977, Prahalad held a post as professor (the Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Strategy) at the University of Michigan’s Ross Business School, while building a body of groundbreaking work on the most significant themes in business today: strategy, emerging markets, innovation, and organizational structure. His book Competing for the Future (Harvard Business School Press, 1994), coauthored with Gary Hamel, established core competencies as a strategic enabler, and strategic intent as a managerial purpose; The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (Wharton School Publishing, 2005) anticipated the remarkable growth of emerging markets; and The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-created Value through Global Networks (McGraw-Hill, 2008), coauthored with M.S. Krishnan, proposed that the most value-added corporate activity would occur across hierarchical boundaries. Along the way, C.K. wrote three of s+b’s most prescient articles: “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid” (First Quarter 2002, coauthored with Stuart Hart), “The Innovation Sandbox” (Autumn 2006), and “Twenty Hubs and No HQ” (Spring 2008, coauthored with Hrishi Bhattacharyya).
C.K. and I conducted two conversations in 2009 — face-to-face in New York on January 26 and by phone on June 19 — about the nature of thought leadership and the evolution of his own ideas. During these discussions, he spoke intimately about the ancient ideas that inspired his management and strategic beliefs, described the process by which his thinking evolved, and offered a clearheaded vision of his greatest hopes for the future. We recorded these conversations without quite knowing how s+b might publish them; we knew only that it would be good to have a record of C.K. Prahalad’s perspective on thought leadership. Now, we are very gratified to be able to offer an edited version.
Big Ideas from Simple Questions
S+B: Which of your ideas have had the most impact — and how did you develop them?
PRAHALAD: One would be the idea of core competencies in a corporation. That has had a long life. For example, it reappears as capabilities-driven strategy. Others included the bottom of the pyramid [the profitability in targeting the 2.5 billion people who make less than US$2.50 per day], co-creation [companies and customers innovating together], constrained innovation [typically used to develop very low-cost but functionally sophisticated products, like the Tata Nano], and dominant logic [the idea that companies are held back by their prevailing view of how to conduct business]. Everybody now talks about shifting mind-sets, which is essentially a dominant logic argument.
In developing all of these ideas, I learned not to start with the methodology, but with the problem. A lot of times, research tends to start with the methodology. I prefer to start with a problem that’s of interest and apply whatever methodology is appropriate.
S+B: For example?
PRAHALAD: To me, the problems of greatest interest are things that you cannot explain with the current prevailing theory. Core competencies was like that. Gary Hamel and I were doing work in the mid-1980s at ICL [International Computers Ltd., a computer hardware and services company that was later acquired by Fujitsu]. The company had enormous technical capabilities, but it was tiny compared to IBM. We asked a simple question: How does a small company take on the dominant competitor in an industry? Management theory at the time said this was not possible. Honda could not take on GM. CNN could not compete successfully with NBC, Walmart with Sears, or Dell with IBM. The theory said that size matters. The underlying logic of unequal balance — relative market share and barriers to entry — would prevent smaller companies from succeeding.
But if you looked closely, exactly the opposite was happening in business. A selective set of small companies were successfully taking on larger ones. Canon took on Xerox; Sony took on Philips. Toyota took on GM. By probing this, Gary and I concluded that these new competitors were leveraging their intellectual resources — as groups, not as individuals. That is how the idea of core competencies [as published in Competing for the Future] was born.
The same thing happened with the bottom of the pyramid. The prevailing assumption was: What is the underserved market in emerging countries? Most companies assumed this market was largely made up of the middle class, which represented about a billion people. A more interesting question was: Why are another 5 billion people not being served? How can you say you’re a global company and not serve 80 percent of humanity?
Then when we started looking around, we suddenly found some examples of people serving that market of 5 billion. So we looked at the logic. Doing business with the bottom of the pyramid meant having a different cost structure and different marketing practices. Rather than the familiar four Ps of marketing — product, price, place, and promotion — we came out with four As: awareness, access, availability, and affordability.
Every one of my research projects started the same way: recognizing that the established theory did not explain a certain phenomenon. We had to stay constantly focused on weak signals. Each weak signal was a contradictory phenomenon that was not happening across the board. You could very easily say, “Dismiss it, this is an outlier, so we don’t have to worry about it.” But the outliers and weak signals were the places to find a different way to think about the problem.
If you look historically at the strategy literature, starting with Alfred D. Chandler Jr.’s Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise [MIT Press, 1962], the most powerful ideas did not come out of multiple examples. They came out of single-industry studies and single case studies. Big impactful ideas are conceptual breakthroughs, not descriptions of common patterns. You can’t define the “next practice” with lots of examples. Because, by definition, it is not yet happening.
S+B: You have to create a story out of what doesn’t exist yet.
PRAHALAD: Yes, and therefore you have to make it conceptually strong. The data is only an illustration. For example, with the “Twenty Hubs and No HQ” article [which described a proposed structure for multinational companies], we didn’t prove the value of this system through examples, because we didn’t have examples. But we laid out a logic about how it might work, connecting the dots, showing a new pattern. I believe that conceptual breakthroughs come when you see a new pattern. And you use stories or companies’ work as examples and illustrations of the concept, not as proof of good practice. In The New Age of Innovation, for instance, I write about Aravind’s remarkable cataract surgery practice, but I use it as an example, not as proof. I never say, “Because of Aravind’s example, we know this should work.” Current practices, however successful they are, may not be robust enough to stand the test of time.
Timing and Logic
S+B: One interesting thing about The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid was its timing. By choice or luck, it came out just as the possibility of a huge emerging middle class became visible.
PRAHALAD: That is true. But the idea was not new then. It was on websites in 1998. A few companies picked up on it: Hewlett-Packard, Intel, some research groups. But nobody wanted to publish it until strategy+business did, and then not until 2002.
The same was true for the central idea in The New Age of Innovation, which had to do with customizing for each purchaser individually (“N=1,” as we called it), but with global resources (“R=G”). We published it just as social networks were emerging, and as all the ideas about Connect + Develop [Procter & Gamble’s open innovation strategy] were emerging. But the concept had been brewing for quite some time. It went back to “co-creation” and “future competition” from the early 1990s. It did not come overnight.
S+B: What makes a topic worthwhile in your view? How pragmatic does it have to be?
PRAHALAD: I take the pragmatic value as a given. I look at the manager’s point of view, not the academic point of view. It also has to be very parsimonious — precise in its thinking. I can take any of my books and give you a flowchart in one page on the substance of the book.
Just for fun, let’s look at The New Age of Innovation this way. We start by talking about the external forces changing business. The first is: Four billion people are connected through wireless telephones. Five billion will be connected by 2015; that’s almost all of humanity, for the first time in human history, communicating with one another. The second force is that the cost of digitization is going down. I can buy a 16-gigabyte thumb drive for $10 and a cell phone for $20. This means access to technology is not anymore a problem, for the rich or the poor. The third is the convergence of functions in every type of product. Cell phones, computers, maps, calendars, TV, radio, watches, cameras — these are all one device. Yogurt is now both a food and a source of bacteria that help people resist aging. The fourth is social networks. As a corporate leader, you need to understand how to deploy these technologies in a way that furthers the dignity of the individual. If you do it right, it can be a very unifying thing in a less-than-unified world.
Together, these trends allow for democratizing commerce. They make consumers more powerful than they used to be. But to what extent will consumers be equal in power to the firms that serve them? To answer that, we look at new firms, like Google and Facebook. Then the logical question is: What is the impact of this new, stronger consumer on old industries, like tires, cars, and healthcare?
Everything before this point in our thought process is obvious; it’s already happening. But we need to look ahead. That leads us to a logical proposition: that companies will use this social and technical architecture to build new capabilities.
We go on to ask: What is the essence of entrepreneurship in this context?
S+B: And your answer…?
PRAHALAD: Having aspirations greater than your resources. That’s universal. Whether you’re Sam Walton or Narayana Murthy [founder of Infosys Technologies Ltd.], if your aspirations are not greater than your resources, you’re not an entrepreneur. For large companies to be entrepreneurial, they have to create aspirations greater than their resources. You can call it “strategy as stretch” or “strategic intent.”
S+B: Is any group with aspirations higher than its resources entrepreneurial?
PRAHALAD: They have the potential. But this is not enough; they have to do two practices well in addition. One, they have to know how to manage and use their resources — not just capital, but intellectual resources. That’s the essence of a core competency. Two, they have to draw these resources from a wider area than most companies do: from partners, suppliers, customers. That’s part of the logic of The New Age of Innovation as well. Then we go on to look in more detail at the new business models, new industry characteristics, and new ways of tackling market inefficiencies implicit in this approach. Those became sections of the book on strategic architecture and expeditionary marketing. The whole book can be summed up in a diagram with all these elements.
With every book or major article I write, I start by looking for a logical structure. It must be as simple as Euclid: The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Once you have this logical framework, everything else, all the examples, are just illustrations.
S+B: How do you deal with the need for precision in your language?
PRAHALAD: You revise. I’ve never published anything that has not gone through six or seven rewrites. A lot of people hide behind math, even if their thinking is not very precise. I find that trying to say something in English forces you to be more precise. You cannot escape it. That is why, for me, the test of a good, powerful piece is when people say, “But it’s so obvious.” You agonize and agonize and then somebody says, “But it’s obvious.” When I was younger, I used to get so irritated by that. Now I think it’s the highest compliment you can get.
Learning to Think Independently
S+B: When did you first get interested in management?
PRAHALAD: I was trained as a physicist, and I started working as an industrial engineer in a Union Carbide factory plant at age 19. Industrial engineering in India at that time was a problem-solving discipline, very much in the tradition of Frederick Taylor. The unit of analysis was work, and the people were secondary. But I was intellectually curious, so I read every book I could lay my hands on and then, over time, tried to apply some of the ideas — everything from value engineering to modeling work processes with synthetic data.
I was very fortunate to have, as a boss, a Harvard MBA. He had been one of the first Indians to be a Baker Scholar [the top academic honor at Harvard Business School]. Now he was the plant manager. I was just a trainee, but for some reason Divakaran liked me, and he would give me books to read. He had a very simple rule: When I returned a book to him, I had to tell him whether it applied in India or not. I think he was trying to get me to think independently, and not accept ideas as valid simply because they came from the United States.
The first book was The Human Side of Enterprise by Douglas McGregor [McGraw-Hill, 1960], the book that introduced Theory X and Theory Y. It sparked my interest in the general question, What motivates people? I reflected on how we might apply this concept in our plant, which had communist labor unions.
I was already fascinated by the way work and people are interrelated. I knew how to conduct time and motion studies and break work down into its constituent parts. I was reasonably good at it. But I saw that when we broke down the work, it changed interactions among people — and more importantly, the skill levels that were required of individuals. This forced me to stop looking at a company or a factory as the unit of analysis, as industrial engineers did. Instead, I started looking at people and teams.
I struggled with this quite a lot because I ran the quality department for about three months while the chief of that department was away. At age 19, I had 60 people to manage, and I had to motivate them and make sure things were going right. That forces you to think about people and what makes them do good work. I also had to worry about improving the pattern of their work. In those years, the Taylorist industrial philosophers fought against the people who talked about human beings and motivation. Nobody was yet thinking about the interrelationship between work and people.
S+B: What happened next?
PRAHALAD: In the late 1960s, I worked for a company called India Pistons, which made automotive components. I loved teaching, so in my spare time, I taught courses on management at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras. Then on Saturdays, for the All India Management Association, I ran computer simulation games on production planning with two other guys. I also worked over the weekends in the Vellore Hospital [the Christian Medical College and Hospital], a major facility close to Chennai, scheduling outpatients using some operations research tools and technology management.
Meanwhile, I was very keen to write. I found writing was the best way to clarify my own thinking. When you talk you can be vague, and the English language can be delightfully vague. When you sit down to write, you see whether you can express your ideas clearly or not. That habit has stayed with me. When I think I have an interesting idea, I try to write it down for myself first.
I then got an MBA at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. I knew enough about industrial engineering by then to be dangerous. It became very clear that to be taken seriously as a teacher or writer, I had to get a good Ph.D.; it was like a union card. In strategy, the choices were very narrow at the time; you went to Harvard to get a strategy education, so that’s where I went.
S+B: What was that like?
PRAHALAD: It was my first time in the U.S., but many of the cases were easy for me, because I had taught them before in India. I spent a lot of time trying to understand large-scale technology management. For example, with Mel Horwich at MIT, I wrote the first series of cases on the evolution of the barcode. I was also very interested in how global companies work, and in strategy. My dissertation was about how a large global chemical company allocated resources. It introduced the idea of balancing global integration and local responsiveness as an essential tension in understanding a multinational company. Corning was a big example at the time, and one conclusion was that you can’t run a diversified global company with one approach to management, because the level of integration and responsiveness is very different for television tubes than it is for cooking ware.
I worked on similar subjects through the 1970s and 1980s, with Pankaj Ghemawat, then with Yves Doz, and then Chris Bartlett and Sumantra Ghoshal. We all started with the same framework — the tension between global and local — but we approached it in different ways.
Of course, we all invented our own terms. Indeed, the biggest impediment in the growth and strategy literature is that, unlike in the financial literature, there are no standardized terms. There is no organizing thesis and principle. My bottom of the pyramid becomes someone else’s “base of the pyramid.” What’s the difference? There’s not even agreement about appropriate units of analysis. Is it one person? A team? A division? What is the fundamental building block of HR?
Changing the Strategy Paradigm
S+B: Did you go directly from Harvard to Michigan?
PRAHALAD: No. I went to India first, but I only stayed a year and a half. There was no ability to do research there; people wanted to kill the multinationals, or at least to nationalize them — not to study them. So I came to Michigan. I met Gary Hamel there when he was a student; he got intrigued with some of the crazy ideas that I had, and our work together led to the research which led to Competing for the Future.
S+B: What do you see as the contribution that you and Gary made in that book?
PRAHALAD: We were able to change the strategy paradigm. At the time, there were three fundamental assumptions underlying the strategy literature. The first was fitness: You have to fit your means with your goals. Instead, we argued for strategy as a stretch: by definition, creating a misfit between your resources and your aspirations.
S+B: This was your point about entrepreneurs before.
PRAHALAD: Yes. No entrepreneur starts with adequate resources for his or her aspirations. If you want to create entrepreneurial drive in a large company, you have to create aspirations that lie outside your resource base.
The second assumption had to do with resources; everybody assumed this meant financial resources. We argued that accumulated intellectual knowledge — the intellectual capacities in organizations called core competencies — represented a new form of currency. This idea had some antecedents in terms of capabilities, but calling it a new currency had important implications. Like any currency, core competencies could be used to create new businesses, and to reduce risk.
S+B: You’re saying that core competencies have intrinsic value as mediums of exchange?
PRAHALAD: That’s right. Look at the components that companies sell each other, like optical drives. These are nothing but the embodiment of intellectual capabilities that are exchanged for cash.
Interestingly, the idea of core competencies has been appropriated over the years by two different functional groups. To R&D teams, it’s about technology and the organization of work. To HR, it’s about people and teams. It was supposed to be a unifying concept, but as these two different groups appropriated the idea, they separated it. Underneath it all is the same theme I was looking for when I was 19 years old: how to integrate the patterns of work with human motivation and excellence.
S+B: What was the third assumption you challenged?
PRAHALAD: It had to do with the idea of strategy as positioning a company in a given industry space. Instead, Gary and I said strategy is about creating new competitive space. This foreshadowed ideas like strategic architecture, shaping your future, expeditionary marketing, and so on.
The Individual and the Organization
S+B: What happened in your life after Competing for the Future came out?
PRAHALAD: It was a tremendous success, and it created a new level of visibility for the work that Gary and I did. Over the next year, I came to the conclusion that it would be very easy to stay on course and keep mining these ideas and writing more about them — but then I was likely to write a mediocre next book. I think many writers fall into that trap.
So in the late 1990s I started looking for the next big idea. I knew it would have something to do with the opening up of markets, such as China and India, that had been dominated before by the Soviet Union. From there, it was very simple to get to The Bottom of the Pyramid. Here are companies desperately trying to grow in new markets, and here are people desperately trying to participate in the benefits of the global economy. So, if you put them together, there must be something good that can happen. I also began researching The Future of Competition: Co-creating Unique Value with Customers [with Venkat Ramaswamy; Harvard Business School Publishing, 2004] at that time, about the rebalancing of power between consumers and the company.
S+B: These seem like very different ideas.
PRAHALAD: Yes, but both are about the movement of ordinary people into new relationships with power. I started as an industrial engineer, but all along I’ve been struggling with the same question: What makes societies work?
S+B: Now that you mention it, it seems like each one of your ideas is about the fundamental viability of human beings: as consumers making a life for themselves, employees offering their skills as part of a bigger competency, or innovators rising to an impossible challenge. It’s as if you’re putting the benefit of the doubt on the human being.
PRAHALAD: Yes. If I had to characterize my deepest belief, I would say it’s the centrality of the individual.
Institutions are not central. Institutions are different ways of combining skills and capabilities of the moment. That, of course, is the opposite of the traditional way of thinking, starting from Max Weber and Frederick Taylor in the early 20th century. They posited that institutions were central to society, not individuals. I believe the contrary is true.
Maybe this comes from my philosophical training in India, with Hinduism, in which there is no central authority. The religion is highly distributed and decentralized, held together by its beliefs. Hindus are taught that individuals must improve their situation by what they do. You may have no choice in how you are born, but you have tremendous choice in what you do.
For example, in the Kartikeya story [from Hindu mythology], there is a conversation between Arjuna the warrior and Krishna the god. Arjuna asks questions and Krishna answers, and then finally Krishna says, “I’ve shown you the truth. Now, you choose.” He never says, “You must do this.”
S+B: How does this affect the way you think about strategy?
PRAHALAD: Conventional strategy didn’t even consider individuals. When a company looked at its resources, it considered its financial situation: could it afford another employee or not, for example, rather than what kind of new employee must it bring aboard.
But when you look at an organization’s core competencies as its most valuable resources, you can begin to think of learning, creating strategy, and innovation as parts of a single long journey. The journey is iterative, interactive, and full of small steps. Nobody gets a big aha one day. Instead, there is searching; there are missteps, experiments, and doubt.
For all of these reasons, it takes time to develop a new idea. If you are a writer, like me, then what you write on any given day may be only a fragment of what you know or what you believe, because you may not be ready to write down everything you have to say. There are breakthroughs, but they happen over a long period of time. 
在採訪中他不幸去世前進行，對照普拉哈拉德 - 聖人的核心競爭力和金字塔的底部 - 回顧了他的職業生涯，並談了發展思路演變。
由藝術克納
哥印拜陀克里希納拉奧（對照）普拉哈拉德將慶祝 69歲生日，他於 2010年8月8日。他是一個最有影響力的和原始的戰略和管理思想家在過去 50年。他也是一個朋友到戰略 +業務，最重要的是，一個朋友和導師，管理思想家和實踐者在世界各地 - 特別是在印度，他在那裡出生和接受教育，並在美國，在那裡他住了最他的職業生涯，直到他去世肺疾病突然從 4月16日。
開始於 1977年，普拉哈拉德先後擔任教授（保和露絲麥克拉肯傑出大學教授戰略）在密歇根大學羅斯商學院，同時建立一個機構的開創性工作，最重要的主題，在今天的商業環境：戰略，新興市場創新，組織結構。他的著作爭奪未來（哈佛商學院出版社，1994），合著與加里哈梅爾，建立核心能力作為一項戰略推動者，並作為一種管理戰略意圖的目的;的財富在金字塔底部（沃頓商學院出版社，2005 ）預期的顯著增長的新興市場，以及新時代的創新：推動共同創造了價值，通過全球網絡（麥格勞一希爾，2008），合著與 MS克里斯南，建議，最增值的企業活動將出現跨越等級界限。一路上，C.K.說 3 s的A + B的最先見之明的文章說：“財富在底部的金字塔”（第一季度2002年，合著與斯圖亞特哈特），“創新沙盒”（2006年秋季）和“20集線器和沒有總部”（ 2008年春，合著與 Hrishi巴氏）。
C.K.我在2009年進行了兩次對話 - 面對面在紐約 1月26日和6月19日通過電話 - 的性質思想演變的領導和他自己的想法。在這些討論中，他以古代密切關注他的管理思想，鼓舞和戰略理念，所描述的過程，他的思想演變，提供了一個清醒的眼光，他最大的希望的未來。我們記錄這些談話不完全知道如何s的A + B可能發布它們，我們只知道這將是很好的有創紀錄的對照普拉哈拉德的角度對思想的領導。現在，我們很高興能夠提供一個編輯的版本。
從簡單的問題大思路
s的A +乙：你的想法有最大影響 - 以及你是如何發展呢？
普拉哈拉德：一是將是思想的核心競爭力的一個公司。這帶來了長壽命。例如，它會重新出現的能力，推動戰略。其他包括底層的金字塔[該盈利目標的2.5億人誰使小於 2.50美元每天]，共同創造 [公司和客戶創新在一起]，約束創新 [通常用於開發成本很低，但功能精良的產品，像塔塔納米]和主導邏輯 [公司的想法是阻礙他們普遍認為，如何開展業務]。每個人現在談論轉變心態套，基本上是一個主導的邏輯論據。
在制定所有這些想法，我學會了不開始與方法，但這個問題。了很多次，研究往往開始的方法。我開始喜歡一個問題的興趣和運用什麼方法是適當的。
s的A + B：因為例子嗎？
普拉哈拉德：對我來說，最感興趣的問題是事情，你無法解釋目前的主流理論。核心競爭力是這樣的。加里哈梅爾和我正在做的工作在80年代中期，在ICL [國際電腦公司，電腦硬件和服務公司，後來收購了富士通]。該公司擁有巨大的技術能力，但它給 IBM相比微不足道。我們問一個簡單的問題：如何做一個小公司採取的主要競爭對手在一個行業？管理理論在當時說這是不可能的。本田通用汽車無法承擔。美國有線電視新聞網無法成功地競爭與 NBC，沃爾瑪與西爾斯，或戴爾與 IBM。該理論指出，規模很重要。其基本邏輯不平等的平衡 - 相對市場份額和進入壁壘 - 將防止規模較小的公司取得成功。
但如果你仔細看，完全相反的結果發生在企業。有選擇性的一套成功的小公司到較大的。發生在施樂佳能，索尼了飛利浦。豐田已於總經理。通過探測這一點，加里和我的結論是，這些新的競爭對手利用他們的智力資源 - 作為群體，而不是個人。這是怎樣的想法的核心能力[作為發表在爭奪未來的]誕生了。
同樣的事情發生了與金字塔的底部。當時的設想是：什麼是低下的新興市場國家？大多數公司承擔這個市場主要是由中等階層，佔 1億人。更有趣的問題是：為什麼 50億人服務不？你怎麼能說你是一個全球性的公司，而不是為人類百分之八十？
後來，當我們開始環顧四周，我們突然發現了一些例子，這個市場的人，為 50億美元。因此，我們看著邏輯。做生意的金字塔底部意味著有不同的成本結構，以及不同的營銷手法。而不是熟悉的四個聚苯乙烯市場 - 產品，價格，地點和促銷 - 我們推出了四個步驟：認識，訪問，可用性和承受能力。
每個人對我的研究項目開始以同樣的方式：認識到沒有既定的理論解釋某種現象。我們必須繼續不斷地集中在弱信號。每個微弱信號是一個矛盾的現象是不會發生的窘況。你可以很輕鬆地說，“解散它，這是一個異常，所以我們不須擔心的。”但對弱信號異常值的地方，以不同的方式來 find一反省這樣的現象。
如果你看一下歷史上的戰略文學，開始與小艾爾弗雷德錢德勒戰略與結構：章在歷史上的工業企業 [麻省理工學院出版社，1962]，最強大的思想沒有出來的多個例子。他們走出單一產業的研究和單一個案研究。大影響力的想法是概念性的突破，而不是描述的常見模式。你無法定義“下實行”以大量的例子。因為，按照定義，它尚未發生。
s的A + B：你必須創建一個故事出不存在的東西呢。
普拉哈拉德：是的，所以你必須在觀念強。這些數據只是一個例子。例如，與“20號總部集線器和”文章[它說明了擬議的結構為多國公司]，我們並不能證明這個系統的價值，通過例子，因為我們沒有例子。不過，我們制定了一個邏輯有關它如何工作，點與點之間，呈現出新格局。我相信，概念性的突破來當你看到一個新的模式。而你用故事或公司的工作作為例子，說明這個概念，而不是作為證明的良好做法。在新時代的創新，例如，我寫的雖然固定線路的顯著白內障手術的做法，但我用它作為一個例子，而不是作為證明。我從來不說，“因為雖然固定線路的例子，我們知道這應該工作。”目前的做法，但他們是成功的，可能不具備足夠的能力經受住時間的考驗。
時序與邏輯
s的A + B：有一個有趣的事情有關的財富在金字塔底部的是它的時機。通過選擇或運氣，它出來，就像一個巨大的可能性，新興的中產階級成為可見。
普拉哈拉德：這是真的。但是，當時的想法並不新鮮。正是在網站於 1998年。也有少數公司拾起它：惠普，英特爾，一些研究小組。但是，沒有人想出版它，直到戰略 +業務做了，然後直到2002年。
同樣是真實的中心思想在新時代的創新，都和每個買方單獨定制（的“N = 1，”我們要求），但與全球的資源（“住宅二G”）。我們發表它只是作為社會網絡的出現，因為所有的思路連接 +開發 [寶潔公司的開放創新戰略]正在出現。但是，這一概念已醞釀了一段時間。這又回到“共同創造”和“未來的競爭”從 20世紀 90年代初。它沒有在一夜之間發生。
s的A + B：什麼使一個主題值得在您的看法？如何務實，難道一定要？
普拉哈拉德：我以務實的價值是理所當然的。我看經理人的角度，而不是學術觀點。它還必須非常吝嗇的 - 準確的思路。我可以採取任何我的書，給你一個流程圖在一個網頁上的內容的書。
只是為了好玩，讓我們看看這個新時代的創新方式。我們開始談論外部勢力不斷變化的業務。第一個是：40億人通過無線連接電話。 50億，到2015年將連接，這幾乎是所有人類的，第一次在人類歷史上，彼此溝通。第二個力量是數字化的成本正在下降。我可以買一個 16 GB的U盤 10元和手機為 20美元。這意味著獲得技術已不再是一個問題，富人或窮人。第三是收斂功能每種類型的產品。手機，電腦，地圖，日曆，電視，廣播，手錶，照相機 - 這些都是一個設備。酸奶是現在既是食品和來源的細菌，可以幫助人們抵抗衰老。四是社會網絡。作為企業領導者，你需要了解如何部署這些技術的方式，進一步加強了對個人的尊嚴。如果你這樣做的權利，它可以是一個非常團結的事在低於統一的世界。
總之，這些趨勢允許商業民主化。他們讓消費者更強大的比以往。但消費者將在何種程度上是平等的權力，為他們提供服務的公司？要回答這個問題，我們期待在新的公司，像谷歌和Facebook。合乎邏輯的問題是：什麼是影響這一新的，更強的消費者在老行業，如輪胎，汽車和醫療保健？
這一點，一切都在我們面前的思維過程是顯而易見的，它已經開始這樣做。但是，我們需要向前看。這使我們的邏輯命題：，公司將利用這個社會和技術架構，以建立新的能力。
我們繼續問：什麼是企業家精神的本質在這方面？
s的A + B：還有你的答案...？
普拉哈拉德：經願望比你的資源。這是普遍的。無論你是山姆沃爾頓或納拉亞納穆爾蒂 [創始人，Infosys技術有限公司]，如果你的願望不大於你的資源，你就不是一個企業家。對於大型企業具有企業家精神，他們創造更大的期望比他們的資源。你可以稱之為“戰略作為拉伸”或“戰略意圖。”
s的A + B：這是任何團體高於其有志創業資源？
普拉哈拉德：他們的潛力。但這是不夠的，他們所要做的兩項做法，以及在增加。第一，他們必須知道如何管理和使用它們的資源 - 不僅僅是資金，而是智力資源。這是一個本質的核心競爭力。第二，他們必須將這些資源從更廣闊的領域比大多數公司都：從合作夥伴，供應商，客戶。這部分邏輯的新時代的創新以及。然後，我們去看看更詳細的新的商業模式，新的行業特點，新途徑解決市場效率低下隱含在這一做法。這些章節的書成為戰略架構和遠征營銷。全書可以歸納為一圖與所有這些元素。
由於每本書我寫文章或重大，我開始尋找一個邏輯結構。它必須被視為簡單的歐幾里德：最短的兩點之間的距離是一條直線。一旦你有這樣的邏輯框架，一切，所有的例子，只是說明。
s的A +乙：你如何處理在您需要精確的語言？
普拉哈拉德：你修改。我從來沒有發表任何有沒有經過六，七重寫。還有很多人躲在數學，即使他們的想法是不是很準確。我覺得想說幾句英語迫使你要更精確。你不能逃脫它。這就是為什麼對我來說，測試的一個很好的，功能強大的片是人們說，“但它非常明顯的。”你煩惱和苦惱，然後有人說，“但很明顯。”當我年輕時，我曾經得到這麼惱火的。現在，我認為這是你能得到的最高讚美。
學會獨立思考
s的A + B：什麼時候你第一次得到感興趣的管理？
普拉哈拉德：我是作為一個訓練有素的物理學家，我開始工作作為一個工業工程師在聯合碳化物公司工廠廠長的19歲。工業工程在印度當時是一個解決問題的學科，在很大程度上是傳統的弗雷德里克泰勒。分析的單位工作，和人民次要的。但我是理智好奇，所以我讀的書我都躺在我的手就可以，然後，隨著時間的推移，嘗試運用一些想法 - 從價值工程的工作流程建模與合成數據。
我很幸運，作為一個老闆，一個哈佛大學工商管理碩士學位。他曾一首印度人是貝克學者 [最高學術榮譽的哈佛商學院]。現在，他是廠長。我只是一個實習生，但由於某種原因Divakaran喜歡我，他會給我的書籍閱讀。他有一個非常簡單的規則：當我回到他的書，我不得不告訴他是否也適用於印度或沒有。我認為他是試圖讓我獨立思考，而不是簡單地接受思想為有效，因為他們來自美國。
第一本書是在人的方面的企業由道格拉斯麥格雷戈 [麥格勞希爾，1960]，這本書是介紹 X理論和Y理論這引起我的興趣在一般性的問題，是什麼觸動人們？我琢磨著我們如何運用這個概念在我們的工廠，有共產黨的工會。
我已經迷上了工作方式和人民是相互關聯的。我知道如何進行時間和動作研究，打破工作分解成它的組成部分。我是相當擅長的。但我看到，當我們打破了工作，它改變了人們之間的相互作用 - 更重要的是，技能水平，還需要個人。這迫使我停止看一個公司或工廠為單位的分析，工業工程師們。相反，我開始看的人及團隊。
我掙扎了不少工作，因為我跑的質量部門約 3個月，而該部門的首席不在。 19歲的時候，我已經 60人來管理，而我必須激勵他們，並確保事情在朝好的方向發展。這迫使你去思考人，是什麼讓他們做好工作。我還擔心改善他們的工作格局。在那些年裡，泰勒工業哲學家對人民的戰鬥誰談論人類和動機。但沒有人想到的工作和人民之間的相互關係。
s的A + B：什麼發生了什麼？
普拉哈拉德：在20世紀 60年代末期，我工作了一家名為印度活塞隊，這使得汽車零部件。我愛教，所以在我的業餘時間，我教的課程管理在印度理工學院馬德拉斯。然後在星期六，為全印度管理協會，我跑了電腦模擬遊戲，生產計劃與另外兩個傢伙。我還努力在週末在韋洛爾醫院 [基督教醫學院和醫院]，主要設施接近欽奈，調度門診病人使用一些業務研究工具和技術管理。
同時，我非常熱衷於寫作。我發現寫作是最好的方式，以澄清自己的想法。當你談論你可以是含糊的，和英文語言可以盡地主之誼含糊。當你坐下來寫，你看你是否能清楚地表達你的想法或沒有。這習慣一直保持和我在一起。當我覺得我有一個有趣的想法，我試著寫下來為自己第一次。
然後我在一個 MBA在印度艾哈邁達巴德管理學院。我知道足夠關於工業工程，屆時危險。它變得非常清楚，必須認真對待的教師或作家，我必須得到一個良好的博士學位，它就像一個工會卡。在戰略上，選擇了在當時很窄，你去哈佛獲得教育策略，所以這是我去的地方。
s的A +乙：那是什麼樣的？
普拉哈拉德：這是我第一次在美國，但在許多情況下很容易對我來說，因為我已經教給他們在印度之前。我花了很多時間來理解大規模的技術管理。例如，在麻省理工學院與梅爾霍里奇，我寫了第一個系列案件的演化條碼。我也很感興趣的全球性公司如何工作，以及戰略。我的論文是關於如何在全球大型化工公司分配資源。它介紹了全球一體化的思想，平衡和地方反應作為一個基本的了解緊張的多國公司。康寧是一個很大的例子在當時，一個結論是，你不能運行一個多元化的全球性公司，管理的一種手段，因為集成度和響應能力是非常不同的電視管比它用於烹飪器皿。
我從事類似問題 20世紀 70年代和80年代通過的，與的Pankaj Ghemawat，然後再與伊夫多日，然後克里斯巴特利特和蘇曼德拉戈沙爾。大家都開始以同樣的框架 - 全球和地方之間的緊張 - 但我們走近它以不同的方式。
當然，我們都創造我們自己的條件。事實上，最大的障礙在文學的成長和策略是，不同的是金融文學，有沒有標準化的術語。沒有論文和組織原則。我的金字塔的底部成為別人的“基地的金字塔。”有什麼區別？還有的甚至不同意對有關單位的分析。它是一個人？一個團隊？表決？什麼是人力資源的基本構造塊？
改變戰略範式
s的A + B：你直接從哈佛到密歇根？
普拉哈拉德：不是，我去了印度第一次，但我只呆了一年半。有沒有能力做研究有，人要殺死的跨國公司，或至少國有化他們 - 而不是去研究。所以我來到密歇根州。我遇到加里哈梅爾當他有一個學生，他就感興趣的一些瘋狂的想法，我做了，和我們一起工作領導的研究而導致競爭的未來。
s的A + B：什麼是你認為你的貢獻和加里在那本書嗎？
普拉哈拉德：我們能夠改變策略的範例。當時，有三個基本假設的基本策略文獻。首先是健身：你有適合您的方式與你的目標。相反，我們主張策略一口氣：根據定義，創造了你的資源之間的失配和你的願望。
s的A + B：這是您點關於企業家面前。
普拉哈拉德：是的。沒有足夠的資源，企業家開始與他或她的願望。如果你想創建一個創業推動大公司，你必須創建你的願望，在於外部的資源基礎。
第二個假設都和資源;每個人都以為這意味著財政資源。我們認為，知識積累的知識 - 組織的知識能力，所謂核心競爭力 - 代表了一種新形式的貨幣。這個想法在以下方面有一些先例的能力，但稱這是一個新的貨幣有重要影響。任何貨幣一樣，核心能力可以被用來創造新的業務，並減少風險。
s的A + B：你說的核心競爭力具有內在的價值作為媒介的交流？
普拉哈拉德：這是正確的。看看公司銷售的組件彼此，像光盤驅動器。這只是體現了對知識產權的能力，是兌換現金。
有趣的是，思想的核心競爭力已撥付了多年來由兩個不同的功能組別。為了研發團隊，它的有關技術和組織工作。到人力資源，這是對人民和團隊。它應該是一個統一的概念，但因為這兩個不同群體撥出的想法，他們分開了。下面這一切是相同的主題我一直在尋找，當我19歲：如何整合的模式與人類的工作和卓越的動力。
s的A + B：什麼是第三個假設你的質疑？
普拉哈拉德：它做的戰略思想，作為一個公司定位在某一行業內的空間。相反，加里和我說的戰略是創造新的競爭空間。這預示想法一樣的戰略架構，塑造你的未來，遠征市場，等等。
個體與組織
s的A + B：什麼發生在你的生活後，爭奪未來的出來？
普拉哈拉德：這是一個巨大的成功，它創造了一個新的水平能見度的工作，加里和我一樣。在接下來的一年中，我得出的結論，這將是很容易停留在過程中，不斷挖掘這些想法和寫更多關於他們 - 但後來我很可能寫一個平庸的下一本書。我想很多作家落入圈套。
因此，在20世紀 90年代後期，我開始尋找下一個大想法。我知道這將是與開放的市場，如中國和印度，已經控制了前蘇聯。從那裡，這是很簡單的去金字塔的底部。這裡是公司拼命地在新的市場增長，在這裡是人拼命地參與全球經濟的好處。所以，如果你把它們放在一起，就必須有好東西都有可能發生。我也開始研究未來的競爭：共同創造的獨特價值與顧客 [與 Venkat拉馬斯瓦米;哈佛商學院出版社，2004]當時，關於重新平衡消費者之間的權力和公司。
s的A +乙：這些看起來非常不同的想法。
普拉哈拉德：是的，但兩者都對運動的普通民眾的關係進入新的力量。我開始作為一個工業工程師，但我一直一直在掙扎同一個問題：是什麼讓社會工作？
s的A +乙：既然你提到它，好像每個人對你的想法是對人類基本生存：消費者作出了自己的生命，員工的技能提供一個更大的一部分能力，或創新上升到一個不可能的挑戰。就好像你把懷疑的造福於人類的。
普拉哈拉德：是的。如果我來形容我最深的信念，我會說這是對個人的中心。
機構不是中央。事業單位的不同方式相結合的技能和能力的時刻。這當然是相反的傳統思維方式，開始從韋伯和弗雷德里克泰勒在20世紀初。他們假定該機構是社會的核心，而不是個人。我相信，事實恰恰相反。
也許這來自於我的哲學訓練在印度，印度教，其中有沒有中央的權威。宗教是高度分散，分散，其關押在一起的信念。印度教徒被教導，個人必須改善他們的處境由他們做什麼。您可能沒有選擇你是如何誕生的，但你有巨大的選擇你怎麼做。
例如，在卡爾提克亞故事[從印度神話]，有一個談話之間阿朱那的戰士和克里希納神。阿朱那問的問題和Krishna答案，然後終於克里希納說：“我已經展示了你的真相。現在，你選擇。“他從不說，”你必須這樣做。“
s的A + B：怎麼這會影響你的方式思考策略？
普拉哈拉德：傳統的策略甚至沒有考慮個人。當一家公司看了看它的資源，它認為它的財政狀況：可能是另一名僱員或不負擔，例如，而不是什麼樣的新員工一定要帶船上。
但是當你看一個企業的核心競爭力為最寶貴的資源，你可以開始想學習，創造戰略，創新作為一個單一的部分長途旅行。這次旅行是迭代的，互動的，充滿了小步驟。沒有人得到一大啊哈一天。相反，有搜索;有失誤，實驗，和懷疑。
出於所有這些原因，它需要時間發展一個新的想法。如果你是一個作家，像我一樣，那麼你寫在某一天可能僅僅是一個片段是什麼你知道或你相信，因為您可能還沒有準備好寫下你要說的一切。有突破，但發生在一個長期的時間。
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