Thinkers Timeline

Chester Irving Barnard (1886-1961) was an American business executive whose book The Functions of the Executive (1938) became one of the foundational works of mid-twentieth-century organisational theory, produced by a practising businessman rather than by an academic. He was born in Malden, Massachusetts, to a family of modest means. His mother died when he was five; he was raised partly by grandparents. He attended Mount Hermon School, working to support himself, then won a scholarship to Harvard University in 1906, where he studied economics and philosophy. He left Harvard in 1909 without completing his degree, having refused to take a required laboratory course, and joined the American Telephone and Telegraph Company as a statistician. He stayed with AT&T or its subsidiaries for most of his working life. He rose to become president of the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company in 1927 and held that position until 1948. He combined his business career with substantial reading in philosophy, sociology, and psychology, drawing on thinkers from Vilfredo Pareto to Alfred North Whitehead. In the 1930s he was invited to give a series of lectures at Harvard, which became The Functions of the Executive. He also served on many public bodies — the United Service Organizations during the Second World War (he was its president from 1942 to 1945), the Rockefeller Foundation (president 1948-1952), the National Science Foundation (chairman 1952-1954), and various advisory committees. He wrote a second book, Organization and Management (1948), and many articles. He was awarded honorary degrees by several universities but never held an academic position. He died in New York in 1961 at seventy-five. His work combined the authority of long practical experience with unusually wide reading, producing a synthesis that academics found intellectually serious and practitioners found grounded in reality.

Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad (1941-2010) was an Indian-American management scholar whose ideas about corporate strategy, core competence, and the business opportunity at the bottom of the pyramid transformed how companies and development thinkers approached both strategy and poverty. He was born in Coimbatore, in Tamil Nadu, the son of a judge and a civil servant. He studied physics at Loyola College, Madras, and worked for four years in an Indian branch of Union Carbide, the American chemical company, before entering the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. In 1972 he travelled to the United States for doctoral work at Harvard Business School, completing his thesis in 1975. He joined the faculty of the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business in 1977 and remained there for the rest of his career. His 1990 Harvard Business Review article with Gary Hamel, The Core Competence of the Corporation, became one of the most-cited business articles ever written and reshaped strategic thinking through the 1990s. His later work took him in a different direction. His 2002 article and 2004 book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid argued that the world's poorest four billion people represented not only a moral claim on international attention but also a significant market that could be served profitably if products and business models were designed appropriately. The book reached business schools, development agencies, and corporations. He continued publishing influential work until his death, wrote regularly for Indian newspapers on the country's development, and mentored a generation of scholars and practitioners. He died in San Diego in 2010 at the age of sixty-eight.