C. K. Prahalad | Management guru, 68

C. K. Prahalad, 68, a management professor and author who popularized the idea that companies could make money while helping to alleviate poverty, died Friday in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego.

The cause was an undiagnosed lung illness, his family said.

Mr. Prahalad wrote The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits, about how companies could tap the poor as customers and, as a result, improve the lives of millions of impoverished people in developing countries.

Executives and scholars say his research helped encourage companies to serve poor customers with products like small-size pouches of shampoo and low-cost cell-phone service.

His work on poverty, and earlier on how companies should build "core competence," earned him a loyal following in corporate boardrooms around the world, especially in India. Although he had lived in the United States for more than 40 years, he traveled frequently to India to advise corporate executives and political leaders.

Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad was born in the south Indian city of Coimbatore on Aug. 8, 1941. His mother was a homemaker and his father was a judge and prominent labor-rights lawyer who wrote several books about Hindu philosophy.

In the early 1970s, Mr. Prahalad came to the United States to pursue a doctoral degree in management at Harvard Business School. After earning his degree, he moved back to India in 1975 but arrived just as Indira Gandhi, then prime minister, was declaring emergency rule and suspending many civil rights.

"As a patriotic person, my father believed that is not what India represented," his son, Murali, said. Two years later, "they made a very tough choice to return to the United States."

He became a professor at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, where he taught until his death, traveling regularly from California.

- N.Y. Times News Service