Baba
Prasad
President
and CEO
Baba
Prasad is an exciting and leading thinker in the area of
innovation and leadership development. Baba Prasad’s outstanding educational
career started when he finished his B.Sc. from Bangalore University (St. Joseph’s College, Bangalore) with a 100% score in Mathematics
among more than 8000 students. He went on to receive his Bachelor of
Engineering (Electrical Engineering) degree from the prestigious Indian
Institute of Science, Bangalore, and his Master of Technology
degree (with distinction) in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics from the University of Hyderabad. After arriving in the USA, Prasad earned a second
Master's in Computer Science from Kansas State University. He then worked for two years as a
technology management consultant for Shearson Lehman and JP Morgan, two
prestigious Wall Street firms. Prasad came back to academia and received his
Ph.D. in Operations and Information Management from the Wharton School in 1997, where he continues to be a
Sloan Fellow at the Wharton Financial Institutions Center.
After his
Ph.D., Prasad taught in the business schools at Purdue University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. Students in his MBA course at Purdue University’s Krannert School of Management noted
him as insightful and inspiring, and he was rated MBA faculty of distinction.
At the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, he consistently received exceptionally
high ratings for MBA teaching. Prasad has also taught in the executive programs
at Wharton and the University of Minnesota.
Leadership Development & Innovation Management
Prasad
founded Vivékin Group following his principal interest in understanding and
helping organizations achieve enduring excellence through leadership and
innovation. It has long been his conviction that organizations become excellent
and sustain that excellence only when leadership and innovation are organic to
the firm. Through his many years of research at Wharton and elsewhere,
Prasad has drawn on a combination of theories from psychology, operations
management, information systems, and cultural anthropology to develop a
groundbreaking framework for leadership based on theories of human
intelligence. He has been using this
framework to help companies create a culture of leadership and innovation throughout
their organizations. The organizations where Prasad has conducted workshops
include companies that range from Fortune 20 firms like IBM and Fortune 200
firms like Estée Lauder and L’Oreal to smaller organizations like Dr.Reddy’s
Labs. Prasad has also delivered talks about his new approach to innovation and leadership
development to CXO-level audiences at the following organizations: Infosys (Bangalore), Wipro (Bangalore), Satyam (Hyderabad), ICICI (Mumbai), Wharton Alumni Club (Bangalore) and Tata Consultancy
Services (Hyderabad).
IT-Based Strategy
As a Sloan
Research Fellow at Wharton, Prasad studied technology strategy in more than 115
retail banks across the US and India, and obtained results that
overturned the then prevailing opinion that the more a firm invests
in information technology, the better its performance. He found to the contrary
that in the 1993-95 time period, banks had over-invested in IT hardware and
software, and that in order for IT to help them become more
productive, banks would have to invest more in people and training. This
research became the centerpiece article of US Banker (August 1997), and was
also presented at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago to an audience that
included luminaries like Chairman Alan Greenspan.
Word-of-Mouth and Online Markets
Prasad has
been a pioneer in studying the influence of word-of-mouth in e-business
environments and has developed product adoption and pricing models for online
services (like banking and content provision) incorporating the effects of
word-of-mouth and expert opinion. In 1997, he modeled customer-behavior in
online-banking services and presented prescient insights about service
adoption and pricing of Internet-banking services, insights that have come to
be vindicated over the last five years by firm pricing behavior and by the
common marketing term "buzz marketing".
Knowledge Management
Prasad has
recently developed a model to view knowledge assets as essentially risky assets
with 10 facets of risk in an innovative approach that makes portfolio methods now
applicable to Knowledge Management.
Prasad travels extensively and some of his most
creative thoughts have emerged while observing people in crowded airport halls,
or while looking at the backs of airplane seats. He lives in Chapel Hill, NC with his wife (a professor at Duke University) and their two young daughters.
Bios of other
affiliates will be added soon
