C.K. Prahalad Award

2011 Prahalad Award Winners

The 2011 Prahalad Award honors Coca-Cola and Muhtar Kent for their galvanizing international leadership on critical global environmental issues and comprehensive efforts to embed sustainability into core business strategy. As co-chair of the Consumer Goods Forum (CGF), a powerful group of 450 major manufacturers and retailers, Muhtar Kent helped catalyze the Forum’s globally significant commitments announced in 2010: to start phasing out HFC refrigerants beginning in 2015 and to strive for zero net deforestation by 2020 in the procurement of palm oil, soy, beef, and paper products.

The company has also been working since 2007 in a transformational partnership with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to address the increasingly severe global water crisis—aiming to conserve seven of the world’s most important river basins and to inspire a global movement focused on water conservation. Coca-Cola has further set a goal to return to nature and communities an amount of water equivalent to what is used in all of its products and their production by 2020. Moreover, Coca-Cola and Mr. Kent have also played a major role in getting the private sector engaged in global climate change talks in Copenhagen and Cancun and are now looking ahead to Durban.

In 2010, Coca-Cola also announced a new 10-year global initiative to empower five million women through the Coca-Cola system. Mr. Kent issued the challenge to their business system and committed to entering into dialogue with their associates, civil society and governments to identify how best to reach this goal through partnerships.

Coca-Cola has also demonstrated a commitment to embedding sustainability into core business strategy. Among its notable actions, the company has invested more than $60 million over the past decade in research, development and production capacity to advance the use of climate-friendly, HFC-free cooling technologies and are phasing out the use of HFC refrigerants in all new cooling equipment as of 2015. It also developed in 2009 the innovative PlantBottle—the first-ever fully recyclable PET plastic beverage bottle made partially from plants, moving the company closer to its vision to eventually introduce bottles made with materials that are 100 percent recyclable and renewable. Coca-Cola’s goal is to use PlantBottle material for all plastic bottles by 2020.

2010 Prahalad Award

The 2010 Prahalad Award was presented to Walmart Brazil and CEO Héctor Núñez for their historic leadership in developing rigorous new standards across the supply chain to address deforestation and other pressing environmental and social challenges. Read more.

About C.K. Prahalad

C.K. Prahalad was the Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan specializing in corporate strategy. After decades of interaction with Global 500 CEOs as one of the world’s most well-respected management strategists, C.K.’s passing brought an abrupt end to what would surely have been a successful mission to innovatively expand sustainability agendas in boardrooms and executive suites across the globe.

C.K. was also a founding member of the CEF Advisory Board and an active participant in the CEF Annual Meetings. With Ram Nidumolu and M.R. Rangaswami, C.K. authored a 2009 Harvard Business Review cover story, "Why Sustainability is Now the Key Driver of Innovation."

C.K.'s authored or co-authored many best-selling business books, including Multinational Mission: Balancing Local Demands and Global Vision (1987), Competing for the Future (1994), The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers (2004), and The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profit (2004).

A prominent world-class figure, C.K. was named number one in the Thinkers50 (the most influential thinkers in management alive today) poll conducted by Suntop media and the Times of London. He was consulted by the top management of many of the world's foremost companies. C.K. served on the Board of Directors of Pearson Plc, Teradata Corporation, Hindustan Unilever Limited, TVS Capital and the World Resources Institute.