I read this first on twitter on my blackberry yesterday- CK Prahalad RIP..
I had never met him, but ofcourse have known of him and his books and his theories like millions of us have. Almost every business conference had references to him in one or the other lectures. Today papers are calling him the retail guru.
I have a few memories associated with his name…i thought it is the right time to share now. It is also the way mind connects different things and figures out how to use information. Since i am not from hardcore business community (design is considered a soft business industry), i had not heard of his name till a few years back. I first heard of him from Uday Dandawate (www.sonicrim.com). Uday and me were interacting a lot for organising the “Design with India” event in New york with Asia Society. In one of the interaction Uday mentioned CK Prahalads name, and i bought his famous book ‘BOP”…the term became a center of strategy in many many meetings later on.. 
what i liked about the book is the fact that it came with a video dvd…which had case studies on the theory which he was putting forward. I loved the concept- very simple, straight forward and easy to do…very designer thinking. I used it for many a solutions to my clients. Landed up saving big resources…it was almost like a “think small” revolution.
Think of anything you do in a smaller scale and larger volumes..it just changes the resource, time and margin equations. At Indi we are working on a “Think Small” approach to design and would be unveiling the initiative sometime soon. I was seriously hoping to have CK’s feedback on this.
Then two years back i was invited to Rockfeller Center in Bellagio (Italy) along with a group of world thinkers to draw a map for social impact projects and i met Larry Kelly (Doblin). I had heard larry deliver a keynote address in HongKong in 2004 at lifestyle asia, and now we are together on the World Design Council. In his introduction Larry introduced himself as a friend of CK and toled us how he and CK discussed BOP thought, and it was larry’s life ambition to give world something like what CK had given.
That day i re-looked at what CK had given to the world in a new light. He made us see and recognise power of poverty, power of numbers and power of “Thinking Small”
