Pix by Jagan Negi

There’s a tinge of irony that’s unmistakable. Slightly over three decades ago, Coimba-tore Krishnarao Prahalad bought himself a one-way ticket to the United States and, armed with only a few dollars in his pocket, set off to make a new life for himself in the New World. The Indian corporate world of that era, he had firmly decided, was too insular and claustrophobic and hemmed in by government regulations.

Today Prahalad, one of the world’s top management gurus — perhaps the topmost of them all — is making a reverse pilgrimage that he probably never dreamt about when he was emigrating to the US. He’s in India roughly every two months and he’s the author of a bullishly futuristic document called India@75, which envisages change on an awesome scale across the country.

More importantly, he’s turning his laser-like management guru’s gaze on the Indian corporate scene and — surprise of surprises — reckons that there are more exciting things happening here than anywhere else in the world. “There’s more vibrant experimentation in India. There’s more innovation in large, small and medium companies,” he says firmly, adding a qualification: “Though, there’s more discipline in execution in China.”

As one of the world’s top management gurus, Prahalad, 67, keeps up a globe-hopping schedule that would exhaust even a teenager. He was in Delhi last month but he had spent the 10 days before that circumnavigating the globe. Starting out from his home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he hopped to New York and then to London. From there he made a longer hop to Nashik and then zig-zagged his way to Chennai and to Mumbai before arriving in Delhi where he was scheduled to speak at a conference. From Delhi he was off to Pune and then to Mumbai and then, finally, back home. Prahalad reckons that he spends, “roughly 40 per cent of my year travelling.”

If you think that’s an exhausting schedule, he begs to differ. “Do I look tired?” he asks almost combatively. “I have been up since 9am (after flying in from Mumbai the previous night). I enjoy what I am doing and I am energised by the response to ideas and the quality of people I meet. They energise me. I get ideas and give them.”

Why does a management professor (he’s the Paul and Ruth and McCracken, Distinguished University Professor, at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan) constantly travel the globe? To understand that, it’s important to remember that management gurus are more than mere professors. Prahalad, for instance, is on the board of Hindustan Unilever and several other large corporations. He has also been a consultant to many of the world’s top corporations. Also, he’s currently researching a score of Indian companies, which he feels are doing particularly innovative work.

Says Prahalad: “My consulting works inform my research. My research allows me to teach because I teach what I’m researching. Teaching gives me contact with brilliant young minds. These are all facets of one activity.”

India has loomed particularly large in Prahalad’s peri-scope in recent years. His most crucial contribution to the corporate world was an article that appeared in the Harvard Business Review in 1990 called The Core Competence of the Corporation. The theory of core competence became one of the key commandments of big corporations globally through the 1990s.

More recently, he turned his attention to countries like India and came up with another book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. The theory enunciates that if you make prices cheap enough you can be affordable even for the very poor in countries like India, Brazil and South Africa — and you can make money at the same time. One example is the mobile phone industry where the cheapest calling prices in the world have triggered a huge boom. Says Prahalad: “Because of necessity India had to innovate. If you want a cellphone call for less than a cent you have to innovate. For instance, you convert every kirana shop into a distributor — and there are 2 million kirana shops around the country.”

Prahalad reckons that the Indian corporate world is finally managing to cut prices and reach out to the huge market at the bottom of the pyramid. One obvious example is the Tata Nano.

The broad outlines of the Prahalad story aren’t unusual. He was one of nine children and his first job was in Union Carbide where he worked for about four years. But he soon changed course and took up management studies — finally picking up a higher degree from Harvard Business School. He returned briefly to teach at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, but finally figured he’d be better off returning to the US.

He began coming back to India as a consultant in the early ’90s after liberalisation pushed open the doors of the Indian market ever so slightly. And he reckons that even then he was ahead of the curve. “I was the first to say that India could achieve 10 per cent growth. And I was also the first to say that India’s large population could be an advantage,” he points out, adding: “So far I have a fairly good track record.”

He briefly tried to ride the technology wave and became an entrepreneur, starting a company called Praja in California. But it didn’t last long and he returned to Michigan. Now his key interest — apart from India — is the environment and sustainable growth. “If you have globalisation and inclusive growth, it means you have five billion new consumers. That means we have to look at sustainability and we have to look at it as an opportunity.”

Prahalad is a relentless optimist (“you can’t be a strategist without being an optimist,” he says), and, for sometime now, he has been very bullish on India.

Does he regret leaving India? “If I was 25 now I probably wouldn’t go abroad,” he says. But he adds: “I’ve helped India by going abroad. Teachers like us are in touch with young people. We professors change perceptions. They think all of India is like us.”