A passion for yogurt, a lesson on leadership and longevity

Do you want to know the path to the best product testimonial you could ever get and the best formula for success in business? Of course, you might have to wait a lifetime to see its full benefits.

The peaceful death earlier this year of Daniel Carasso, former head and honorary chairman of Groupe Danone, at the ripe old age of 103, is a tribute to a lifetime of consuming yogurt – or perhaps a lifetime of dedication to his products.

If you create products that you believe in passionately as a force for good – in Carasso’s case, as a force for fostering health and well-being – you, too, can live to be 103 and build a global empire.

Today, too much business thinking is short-term. Too many entrepreneurs start businesses with the goal of selling them and cashing in. Too many companies sacrifice the quality of their products, cutting too deeply so they can squeeze out profits. Too many managers flit from company to company, trying to increase their compensation with each move.

Some say this short-term thinking was responsible for the events that led to the global financial crash. This kind of thinking doesn’t build sustainable businesses, nor does it develop national economies. And it leaves the human spirit empty of purpose and meaning.

That’s why Carasso’s death made international headlines, and why his life is a model for leaders who want to build long-term social value as well as economic value, and to create institutions that endure. Carasso promoted health and got rich. He loved his products and he kept them alive, even through very challenging global crises.

Carasso’s story began in southern Europe, but became global. His father, Isaac, a physician, migrated from Thessaloniki, Greece, to Barcelona, Spain, and started a business in 1919. He sold yogurt made with cultures from the prestigious Pasteur Institute, and named the yogurt Danone, echoing his son Daniel’s nickname in Catalan.

In its early years, Danone yogurt was marketed as a health food and sold by prescription through pharmacies. In 1929, Daniel Carasso, having studied business and bacteriology (to better understand yogurt), established the Danone brand in France.

Carasso and his company survived the Great Depression, World War II, post-war recessions, mergers and acquisitions, and changing consumer preferences. With Danone, he transformed yogurt from an obscure ethnic food to a worldwide sensation. Carasso’s story holds inspiring lessons about the healthiest ingredients in business: innovation, collaboration and long-term commitment.

Along the way, Carasso remained dedicated to yogurt no matter what happened. He ignored the beginning of the Great Depression because he was too busy finding stores for his product in France, as The New York Times reported. After fleeing the Nazis in 1941, he found U.S. partners with whom he created the U.S. version of the product, under the name Dannon. Yogurt rose from obscurity in niche markets into the mass consumer mainstream when Dannon added fruit jam to appeal to Americans’ taste for sweeter fare. Dannon was sold to Beatrice Foods, and Carasso returned to Europe after World War II to grow Danone into a global brand. The company merged several times, eventually forming Groupe Danone in 1973. In 2008, the company had worldwide sales of more than $20 billion.

Carasso’s success was rooted in a lifetime of innovation, yet often the innovations were very simple. Making a product more user-friendly can quickly propel it from a niche market to a mainstream one without radical new invention. His success is a tribute to finding creative but very simple innovations that keep enhancing the product, allowing it to leap ahead in popularity. Adding jam to yogurt doesn’t require scientific genius or grand statements about disruptive technologies, but it was still revolutionary for yogurt.

The growers’ cooperative that markets cranberry juice under the Ocean Spray name understood this. For years, the tiny tart berry grown in the northeast U.S., in New England bogs, was an acquired taste for a small niche market. Ocean Spray’s Dannon-like breakthrough was developing blended juices by adding sweetness and pizzazz – cranraspberry, cranapple, crangrape, cranpeach. (Cranprune didn’t work, as many of us would have predicted.)

Successful companies are open to creative partnerships, willing to add something from outside their core to enlarge a product’s appeal.

Contrast Carasso’s long-term dedication to selling and promoting yogurt to the way many businesses have been conceived in recent years: as empty vessels for making money rather than enduring contributions to well-being.

Before the recession, the world moved so fast that technical products could become obsolete in months, if not minutes. Before the recession, some entrepreneurs dreamed less of their product and more about cashing out. During the recession, some entrepreneurs are undoubtedly thinking about giving up rather than selling even harder.

Carasso lived though a century of turbulence and destructive change, some of it much worse than anything we see today. He persisted when others gave up, reached out to partners to help him implement his vision, remained true to his values and never lost his passion for yogurt.

Maybe it wasn’t consuming yogurt that gave him a long life; maybe it was his enduring confidence and belief in yogurt as his product.

Doing what one cares about as a force for good in the world is probably the real prescription for personal longevity. And it’s certainly a great way to lead companies to success.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter is a world-recognized expert on strategy, innovation and leadership and is the author of 17 books, most recently “Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End.”

Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate