C.K. Prahalad named the top management guru in the world

C.K. Prahalad, the Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University of Michigan Professor of Corporate Strategy has been named the top Management Guru of the World by "Thinkers 50". C.K. Prahalad beat out Bill Gates (ranked 2nd) and Allen Greenspan (ranked 3rd).

Quoting University of Michigan Ross School of Business website:

According to Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove of Suntop Media, not many management thinkers actually follow up important early ideas with genuinely groundbreaking future ideas.

"This is what C.K. Prahalad has managed to do," Crainer said. "His work with Gary Hamel set the strategic agenda of the 1990s. Now, with 'The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid,' he has established the social, entrepreneurial and economic agenda of our times."

C.K. Prahalad's Early Life (via Wikipedia)

Prahalad is one of nine children. His father was a well-known Sanskrit scholar and judge in Madras, India (now Chennai). When he was 19, Prahalad was recruited by the manager of the local Union Carbide battery plant. He worked there for four years. Prahalad calls his Union Carbide experience a major inflection point in his life.

Prahalad then went to the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA), where he fell in love with a student at a nearby university. After five years spent trying to win their families' approval, the couple married and left for Harvard University. There Prahalad wrote a PhD thesis on multinational management in just two and a half years. The couple then returned to India, where he taught at the IIMA. But his ideas on global business were under constant attack from nationalists in India. He decided to return to the United States, as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.