Ajit Sharma
12 April 2004

I came to the US at the start of 1999 to work for Fanuc Robotics. Fanuc had a generous full tuition reimbursement policy. Thus at the earliest opportunity, I applied and got admitted to the evening MBA program of the Ross School of Business. At Ross, I came to know of the late Prof. C.K. Prahalad (fondly referred to as C.K.) — a larger than life academician who was not a ‘typical publish-perish academic’. At the earliest opportunity, I took a strategy course with C.K.. He was living in San Diego then, and would fly to Ann Arbor every Thursday to take the class. He used to stay in the executive residence of the business school overnight before taking the flight back home the next day. In his class, he mentioned some of the ideas he was developing around the concept of the ‘bottom of the pyramid’. He had already written an article about it in 2002 with Stuart L Hart in Strategy+Business. A group of us from the ‘Emerging Markets Club’ at Ross were intrigued and started to follow him to his executive residence after class. For me this meant that I would have to stay back in Ann Arbor for a few more hours after class had ended at 10 pm. The one and half hour commute back home meant it was well after midnight that I reached home. I became increasingly involved in this project and eventually worked very closely with Professor Prahalad on his research. I ended up co-authoring a chapter on affordable housing in his book — The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

This book ended up several best book awards in 2004, including from the Economist, Amazon, and Barned and Noble.

While working with CK on this project, I clarified my life’s goals as applying technology (my area of expertise) to solve for problems at the Bottom of the Pyramid. A lot of what I have done till now, and what I continue to do is a continuation of this early engagement with CK. I owe an intellectual debt to CK for guiding and mentoring me as I assisted him in his pioneering work on the “Bottom of the Pyramid” paradigm.