MADRID — Mariano Puig, who helped transform his family-owned Spanish perfume maker into an international fashion house that encompasses the brands Paco Rabanne, Nina Ricci, Carolina Herrera and Jean Paul Gaultier, died on April 13 in Barcelona. He was 93.
Puig, the company that bears the family name, confirmed the death.
As a member of the second generation to run the company, Mr. Puig significantly expanded its presence overseas, particularly in the 1960s, when Puig opened offices in the United States and struck an alliance with Mr. Rabanne, a Spanish fashion designer whose celebrity status in Paris gave Puig better access to the French market.
Puig eventually took over Paco Rabanne and other major brands. One of Mr. Puig’s five children, Marc Puig, is the current chairman and chief executive of the company, which was founded by Mariano Puig’s father, Antonio, in 1914.
Puig had revenues of about €2 billion, or $2.4 billion, in 2019. It is one of the few major fashion businesses still under the ownership of its original family in a luxury goods sector dominated by conglomerates like Kering and LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.
United Nations building in New York. The drawing became the design for the bottle of their first successful perfume, called Calandre. Puig eventually took over Mr. Rabanne’s entire business, including his fashion house.
Mr. Puig followed a similar path in the 1980s with Carolina Herrera, the Venezuelan fashion designer, who had gained fame in New York. They launched a perfume brand together before Puig took over her fashion house as well, in 1995.
Mr. Puig was chief executive of the company until 1998 and then chairman of Exea, the holding company through which his family controls Puig, for another five years.
He was a supporter of family corporate ownership and helped found the Spanish Family Business Institute in Barcelona. José Luis Blanco, its director general, paid homage to Mr. Puig as a key player in the overhaul of Spanish industry, which had been left in tatters by the civil war and did not have the benefit of recovery funds from the Marshall Plan after World War II.
Alongside a few other business leaders of his generation, Mr. Puig “managed to transform this nation from ruins into the modern and dynamic country that we have today,” Mr. Blanco said.
Along with his son Marc, Mr. Puig is survived by his wife; a brother, José María; four other children, Marian, Ana, Ton and Daniel; and nine grandchildren.
As one of the most prominent business tycoons of Barcelona, Mr. Puig help finance several local arts foundations and museums as well as IESE.
He sought to steer clear of politics, and he deplored the decade-long secessionist conflict in Catalonia, which reached a boiling point in 2017, when the Catalan regional government made a failed attempt to declare an independent Catalan republic, with Barcelona as its capital.
In a letter published that year in La Vanguardia, the Barcelona-based newspaper, Mr. Puig wrote: “I feel very Catalan, I feel very Spanish, and I have deep love for my city. But recently we have lived a contradiction that can only make me feel sad.”
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Humor: Serious Business,” which shows aspiring executives and entrepreneurs how to leverage laughter for better relationships and business results. They’ve also distilled their findings into a new book, “Humor, Seriously: Why Humor Is A Secret Weapon in Business and Life.”
But can people really be taught to be funny at work? Should people be taught to be funny at work?
If you explain a joke, its force disperses. The whole point of “The Office,” after all, is that it’s agony to work with a self-appointed comedian. And the framing of humor as a tool of self-advancement is somewhat unsettling, evoking the image of a sociopath calmly studying the human psyche’s soft spots to exploit them for professional gain.
Humor at work is much less about wisecracks than about levity: the shared moments of lightness that propel relationships forward and balance the seriousness of labor.
more motivating and admired. Their employees are more engaged. Their teams are more likely to solve a creativity challenge. There’s all this evidence around the R.O.I. of humor.
And then the failure myth: People think that failing at humor is going to have these huge repercussions. We teach our students that it’s so much less about telling jokes. It’s about cultivating joy.
rule of three” or contrast or exaggeration to get the outcome they want — which is, in this case, laughs. It’s just like how athletes know the exact form that they should use.
That’s a good analogy. You can have a healthy, happy life as someone who exercises regularly but never crosses over into athletic competition. It sounds like it’s also fine to be a person who appreciates humor but prefers not to be the one cracking jokes.
has said: “The easiest way to be funny is not to try — instead, just look for moments to laugh.” This isn’t about being funny. This is about being generous with laughter. You’re empowering others to use it, and showing up much more as a human — not a clown.
How can leaders ensure the humor they’re encouraging is appropriate?
Aaker: Many people who have used humor to good effect in the past often equate humor with their style of humor. Like, “I just threw out a joke, it didn’t land, I think it would have two years ago, therefore the world is not funny anymore.” The calculation is not that the world is humorless, per se. It’s that we need to better understand the diversity of humor styles that other people have, and better understand — through empathy more than anything else — how to better read a room and understand the dynamics of status.
What’s interesting is that while trust in leadership is plunging — which is a problem for leaders who have used the same old jokes for a while — those organizations that somehow manage to maintain a high-trust environment are thriving.
We know that when employees rate what characteristics inspire trust, their answers are things like, “My boss speaks like a regular person.” We’re living in a time when empathy, inclusivity and authenticity are important for all leaders. Humor is actually a secret weapon that can serve them well.
So how do we keep levity alive on remote teams, when you don’t have the in-person benefits of facial expression and tone — or feel like you have much to laugh about?
Bagdonas: This was such a pressing need that at the beginning of the pandemic that we created a course called “Remotely Humorous,” which is all about having humor in remote teams.
Part of this is creating space for it. We need to have a norm that at the beginning of every call, we just talk like humans rather than jump right into the agenda. We talk about what just happened with our kids, or whose dog is running around in the background or what genuine mishap has happened in people’s lives due to this pandemic.
meetings, email and other workplace absurdities. “Never look for what’s funny,” Ms. Cooper told Stanford students in a guest lecture. “Look for what’s true, and go from there.”
Demi Adejuyigbe
The comedian and writer for shows like “The Good Place” and “The Late Late Show With James Corden” finds the funny in everything, including technology’s tendency to overcomplicate our personal and professional lives.
Amber Ruffin
The host of “The Amber Ruffin Show” has been a writer on “Late Night With Seth Meyers” since 2014. She regularly appears with co-writer Jenny Hagel in the segment “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell,” where the two women deliver punch lines that would sound wrong coming from a straight white guy’s mouth, in any setting.
What do you think? Is work better when there’s humor or should it be strictly business? Let us know: dealbook@nytimes.com.
