The New Age of Innovation (Again)
Due to my hectic schedule of travel and work during the past year, I failed to catch the April 2010 passing of C.K. Prahalad, one of the most influential business thinkers of the past 40 years. Management professor, author, technologist, free-thinker and advocate, Prahalad’s contribution to modern business theory was the idea that making money and helping people were goals that could be accomplished in tandem.
If you have ever used the now-buzzword “core competence” in your bizspeak Powerpoint slides (just after the requisite Seth Godin quote and just before the stock image of illuminated shaking hands), you can thank Prahalad for it. In 1961, Prahalad invented the term core competency to describe the quality of “focusing on what you know best.” His work on poverty and corporate responsibility earned him worldwide respect, mostly in his native India and in the United States. He pushed companies to be more inventive and ambitious in identifying expansion targets, while strongly endorsing lower-class consumers as a viable market.
Concerned about the skew of economic growth that favored upper class development in India, Prahalad wrote a book called The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits detailing successful business initiatives that also reduced poverty. One such example was e-Choupal, a project where a tobacco, food and hotel conglomerate provided computers to farmers so they could compare pricing of commodities in multiple markets. This raised incomes among individual farmers while reducing overhead costs across the enterprise.
According to today’s NY Times Magazine piece, Prahalad was a bit of a maverick, rejecting classical academia in the belief that “life is too short to work on inconsequential problems.” He made his living primarily by investigating big ideas, populating each with case studies and making them accessible to widely global audiences. Inspired by a 2005 Fast Company article, I wrote a blog piece about a classroom exercise Prahalad conducted for executive leadership trainees. Seeking to tell a story on the value of competition, Prahalad drew an historical metaphor between spunky upstart and incumbent powerhouse by referencing a Cortés/Montezuma battle from the 16th-century:
A master teacher, Prahalad lulls his students into thinking that they know the answers to his constant barrage of questions. Then, slowly, he removes the veil, allowing them to see that they are wrong. In an hour, the students go from confident blusterers to humbled novices. Only at the end does Prahalad guide them from utter confusion to a new level of understanding. “They have to go through the valley of death,” he says. It’s another of Prahalad’s core beliefs: Only when you are challenged, unsafe, out of your zone, can you find self-knowledge.
In revisiting C.K. Prahalad’s life and career, I connected very personally with these ideas as they pertain to my current status and upcoming goals. Much of my work life in 2010 centered around the concept of “innovation,” pertaining mostly to the cultivation of technology products for the life sciences market. It was quite a banner year in terms of my own ideological development, and I’m truly thankful for the opportunities and experiences that have been presented to me from all fronts.
As important as product design is in the course of innovation, however, there is an equally vital component: the ability to recognize one’s unique strengths and weaknesses as a utile skillset (a “core competency”) in the process of achieving a goal. It’s the same for companies as for individuals; one can reach a higher ideal in performance, or lose the plot completely due to myopic parochialism. It’s a tricky balance, answerable only to the self and to whom one serves, and I’m looking forward to expanding this range for the greater good in 2011.
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