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C. K. Prahalad

The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid 1st Edition

by C. K. Prahalad (Author)

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Presents the theory that there are commercial opportunities in the poor nations of the world for private companies, and that companies can utilize this knowledge to make profits and at the same time fight poverty.

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0131877291
ISBN-13

978-0131877290
Edition

1st
Publisher

Wharton School Pub
Publication date

January 1, 2006
Language

English
Dimensions

6 x 0.75 x 8.75 inches
Print length

273 pages
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About the Author

“…he may well be the most influential thinker on business strategy today.”

BusinessWeek

Internationally recognized as a specialist on corporate strategy and value-added of top management in multinational corporations, C.K. Prahalad has consulted with many of the world’s foremost companies. In addition to being the Harvey C. Fruehauf Professor of Business Administration at the University of Michigan, he serves on the board of Directors of NCR Corp., Hindustan Lever Ltd., and the World Resources Institute.

A prolific author as well, his book, Competing for the Future (co-authored with Gary Hamel), was a national bestseller and was the Best Selling Business Book of the Year in 1994. He also co-authored Multinational Mission: Balancing Local Demands and Global Vision (in 1987 with Yves Doz) and The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers (in 2004 with Venkat Ramaswamy).

He has been named among the top ten management thinkers of the world in every major survey for over ten years.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Wharton School Pub; 1st edition (January 1, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 273 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0131877291
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0131877290
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.75 x 8.75 inches

Customer Reviews:
4.4 118 ratings

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C. K. Prahalad

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C.K. Prahalad was Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Strategy at the Ross School of Business, The University of Michigan. He was a globally recognized management thinker. Times of London and Suntop Media elected him as the most influential management thinker alive today in 2007. He coauthored bestsellers in management such as Competing for the Future, The Future of Competition, and The New Age of Innovation. He won the McKinsey Prize for the best article four times and received several honorary doctorates, including one from the University of London and the Stevens School of Technology. He worked with CEOs and senior management at many of the world’s top companies and was also a member of the Board of NCR Corporation, Pearson PLC., Hindustan Unilever Ltd., The World Resources Institute, and The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE).

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Bernardo Margulis

Interesting and insightful read, not just for business people

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 23, 2008

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I learned about CK Prahalad and the BOP about two years ago doing a school project. I'm a graphic designer, so my approach is far removed from the typical business person's. After this project, I used this book to guide my senior project (design equivalent of a thesis), in which I made up a company that served the BOP in Venezuela and created a brand and packaging system for it. As a non-business person, it was sometimes challenging to follow the book, but it was not overwhelming. I agree with other comments that say that it was a bit technical (especially with all the abbreviations), but it was still approachable.

I'd recommend this not just for business people and entrepreneurs. Poverty is a world-wide issue and this book shows new and innovative ways of dealing with it. We can find uses for this theory in many different realms and disciplines and the theory forces us to think outside of the box. I was especially appreciative of the non-subsidies and the notion that poverty alleviation can come from sustainably profitable operations. I also like the idea of environmental sustainability as a must when dealing with the vast majority of the world as consumers.

I would also recommend "Out of Poverty" by Paul Polack. I liked Prahalad's position better, as Polack falls short in addressing exclusively money as a poverty factor and disregards life quality as something we should address; something that Prahalad does address. But Polack addresses an even poorer segment of the world and we can learn from both theories.

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John Gibbs

A new paradigm for poverty relief

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 24, 2011

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If we stop thinking of the poor as victims or as a burden and start recognizing them as resilient and creative entrepreneurs and value-conscious consumers, a whole new world of opportunity will open up, according to C K Prahalad in this book. Rather than being a drain on the rich world's resources, the poor can be a source of innovations and the engine of the next round of global trade and prosperity.

For more than 50 years a broad range of government and non-government organizations have been fighting poverty, but they have not succeeded in eradicating it. According to the author, we need a new approach which involves partnering with the poor to create large-scale profitable entrepreneurship in which the poor are actively engaged. There is a significant opportunity for value-creation latent in the bottom-of-the-pyramid market.

The book goes on to describe a number of companies which are successfully enriching the lives of the poor while operating profitably. Aravind Eye Care System, which provides cataract surgery, operates profitably and is the largest eye care facility in the world, yet 60% of the patients are treated for free. ITC placed computers in villages, allowing farmers to check prices, make better decisions, and improve their income. Many other large-scale success stories are told.

In my view the book proposes a very helpful approach to fighting poverty, devoid of the usual paternalistic assumptions. On the whole the poor are not looking for our charity; they are looking for opportunities to use their skills and labour to improve their circumstances. However the title of the book seems to overstate the "fortune" that is to be made. The examples given by the author were viable businesses, but they were focused on serving their customers, not on making a fortune. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in serving the poor.

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Emc2

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and anecdotal evidence is not proof

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 24, 2007

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Last year this book became a best seller hit among the developmental community at Washington, D.C., to the point that all bookstores at Metro DC run out of it. With notorious and well publicized praising comments from Madeleine Albright, Bill Gates and the like, I bought it too, but just to discover all the frenzy was undeserved from the viewpoint of poverty eradication.

Undoubtedly Mr. Pralhad's research demonstrates there are plenty of opportunities to do good business among the poor at the BOP (bottom of the pyramid), for them to benefit from the products and services not available now, and for some of them to go out of poverty by becoming entrepreneurs (market penetration is always limited). I agree on these conclusions, as commented extensively by the previous reviewers, and without a doubt this book will become a reference in many Business Schools. But to assert that this strategy will eradicate poverty and bring development is plain sophistry. As Carl Sagan said "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

Why sophistry? Regarding the poverty eradication claimed by Mr. Prahalad I will try to highlight some of the main flaws in his rationale and lack of sufficient evidence:

1. Despite the consideration of several cases from around the Third-World, most of the discussion and arguments to build the framework are related to India, excessively. The conditions of the poor in Latin America are quite different, and often, they have better public services available to them. On the other hand, many African countries have worst conditions. So you can not reach valid conclusions based solely on a country with such unique cultural and ethnical conditions. For doing business the cases are fine, especially for India or China because they are such huge markets at the BOP.

2. Wealth creation is hugely overestimated. Poor entrepreneurs and their immediate family will undoubtedly benefit from these new economic activities, but the framework lacks an explanation about how these oases of welcomed capitalism will trickle-down to the rest of their neighbors and poor villages. The implicit assumption is that everybody at the BOP has to become an entrepreneur for this strategy to work, because by just having access to affordable consumer products it seems very unlikely that poverty will be eradicated. The proposed framework is just good for doing business and for the poor to have access to new services and products, but where is the sustainable "fishing industry" for the rest of the poor population? The cases are very unique, islands of excellence, and with limited potential for a population the huge size of the BOT to bail out of poverty in significant numbers.

3. The analysis lacks the historical, cultural, legal and socio-economical background for a given country or region, and this consideration is fundamental for a proper analysis on sustainable development. Even when Mr. Pralhalad correctly identifies lack of education, corruption and the size of the informal sector as barriers for development and doing business, he then oversimplifies a lot on how to overcome these key issues, and again, an isolated Indian case is used as the magic formula to solve the problem through information technology. In fact, at the end of Chapter 6, within the conclusions, he recognizes that the illustrations he provides "are but islands of excellence in a sea of deprivation and helplessness". As the development community knows well, these successful stories are very hard to replicate. In Latin America we have the outstanding cases of Chile, Uruguay and Costa Rica. In Brazil, we have the cases of the Southern states of Santa Catarina, Paraná, São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul. All of them very developed as compared to their neighbors (in terms of income, education, health, etc.), but despite all efforts, no one has successfully reproduced these islands of excellence at a scale that makes a difference.

4. An example will help to understand how superficial the cases are from a point of view of development and poverty eradication. The Brazilian case of "Casas Bahia" lacks the consideration of the socio-economic environment of the country, especially the case omits to mention key characteristics of the financial and credit markets (for those interested in this particular case from the point of view of business, I recommend you read "Samuel Klein e Casas Bahia: Uma trajetoria de Sucesso", Novo Seculo, 2005, this is a real and really impressive business success story). Mr. Klein successfully, by trusting the poor, built an empire that today is still one of the few option many mid- and low-income families have to buy the first computer for their children going to college in Brazil. But, let's see why the market share for credit cards is only 4%, and why it is not a real threat for Casas Bahia own financial system as stated in the book, as well as why there is not much in here to help eradicat poverty in Brazil. Annual inflation today in Brazil is in the order of 3-4%, and the Brazilian currency, the "Real" have been steadily revaluating against the dollar for the last 3 years. However, interest rates in Brazil are sky-high, a legacy of the hyper-inflation times of twenty years ago. Interest rates for well-known international credit cards are 9-11% per month, which compounded translates to an annual rate close to 180%, regardless of whether you're poor or rich. Today retail chain stores of this type charge around 3% per month, embedded in the price of the consumer products, so the consumer doesn't know up-front the real price. This translates to a compounded rate of 43% per year. Often if you try to pay upfront, there is no discount. So where is the real benefit for the poor? Or are they just getting every day more indebted, and spending money on fat interests that they could have used to buy more or better food or better health services for their kids. I do not see where poverty eradication fits in this case. Obviously Brazil has a problem of lack of real competition in the capitalist sense; even the branches of American Banks doing business in Brazil charge these exorbitant rates. As a reference for the readers, you can buy a 30Gb iPod in Brazil for the "reasonable" amount of US$1,000, payable in 12 installments, and for the high price we also have to thank the federal government high taxes on almost everything. Coming back to the case, as an additional "benefit", you only can make the payments in person at stores of the retail chain, just to make sure the poor are tempted every month and come back for more when they are close to payback that debt. That's why there is a 77% of clients who make reapeat purchases as the book reports. Not surprisingly the case description mentions the criticism "that Casas Bahia simply exploits the poor and charges them exorbitant interest rates", but neglects to present a due explanation of why this is not truth, and simply disregards the cristicism.

5. Finally, Mr. Prahalad is extremely optimistic. At he end of Chapter 6 and in his own words: "I have no doubt that the elimination of poverty and deprivation is possible by 2020". This prophecy speaks by itself about the reliability of the analysis. And again, let's remember that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. All the book presents is anecdotal evidence, which is not proof as any scientist knows, and the framework presented has no predictive power, much less to assert that poverty will end by 2020.

Unquestionably an excellent business book, and a very innovative one, but just for that, business. That's why to me it only deserves 3 stars. On the other hand, not much value-added in there for doing real sustainable development across the board, as the author insinuates and some of the readers think, and certainly not much for real poverty eradication. For that outrageous addition to the book's title I took the other 2 stars. The "Erradicating poverty through profits" part of the book's title should be erased, so the book really deserves the 5 stars most reviewers gave to it (and as the previous reviewer rightly complained, the cases were really awfully edited for the paperback edition, even with repeated sentences). Definitely this book is not recommended if you are serious about new ideas for sustainable development. For a real book on that subject, read the recently publicated The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier, though its scope refers mainly to very poor African countries, it is an example of a serious and proper approach to the problem of eradicating poverty. To understand the complexities of promoting development, you may also read Making Globalization Work by Joseph Stiglitz. These two books will clearly ilustrate why "The Fortune at the BOP" is not a book on development, and absolutely, no Nobel Prize is deserved.

43 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Five Stars

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on April 21, 2017

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A good case very selectively made

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 14, 2019

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I bought this book after many reviews highlighted its significance. Its central theme, that selling the same product millions of times to those that need them via low margin / high volume business models is a good one. However one would need to tell the reader that not all poor people and BOP markets are in India. Good thesis , but geographically desperately blinkered and actually quite typical of Washington consensus views in which one size - once determined - fits all.

One person found this helpful

raymond loveridge

Frugal innovation

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 3, 2020

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A foundational book in the ares of economic development.

Amazon Customer

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 11, 2018

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All fine!

udham

Five Stars

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on March 11, 2015

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excellent

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