Meet India's top business gurus
Indian management gurus rock when it comes to influencing global corporate strategy.
The latest ranking of the world's top business gurus by the European Foundation for Management Development proves this.
Called Thinkers 50 2005, the elite list features four Indians among the world's 50 leading business gurus. Here's a brief look at them:
C K Prahalad, rank #3
Strategy guru C K Prahalad, of the University of Michigan, who jumped nine slots from number 12 last year, is ranked the world's third most influential management guru today.
Prahalad, who pioneered the concept of core competence, in his latest book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid challenges conventional thinking about markets in poor countries. It is a call to businesses to include the world's 5 billion poor in their profit-making strategies.
Sixty-four year old C K Prahalad was born in the town of Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu. He studied physics at the University of Madras and then took up employment as a manager in a branch of the battery major Union Carbide Corporation (now a wholly owned arm of The Dow Chemical Company).
He then moved to the United States for further education and earned himself a PhD from Harvard. He also taught, both, in America and India, and then joined as a professor at the University of Michigan's Business School, where he holds the Harvey C. Fruehauf chair of Business Administration.
During his early days in the US, he met Gary Hamel, then a business student. His book Competing for the Future, co-authored with Gary Hamel, is regarded as one of the best business books of the 1990s.
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Text: rediff Business Desk & Agencies