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Transcript

Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett, 

Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And we’re finding our way, 

Peter: Navigating the opportunities 

Jesse: and challenges 

Peter: of design and design leadership, 

Jesse: Welcome to the next phase. 2025 is the 100th anniversary of the Centralized Design Group at Dutch manufacturing powerhouse Philips. Current Head of Philips Design, Peter Skillman, joins us to share lessons from Philips’ century of design innovation, from light bulbs to the compact disc to healthcare technology.

We’ll also talk about the cultural factors that support design influence, what he learned and had to unlearn from his time in Silicon Valley, and how the game for design leaders has fundamentally changed in recent years.

Peter M.: Our guest today with us is Peter Skillman, a design leader who’s been working for quite a while with experience at Palm Computing, Nokia, Microsoft, Amazon, and now Philips. Thank you for joining us, Peter.

Peter S.: It is an honor to be here after, you know, connecting with you for so many years now.

Peter M.: Let’s start with what you’re up to now. What does it mean to be the global head of design for Philips? 

History of Philips Design

Peter S.: Let’s start with, like, on January 5th, 1925, Louis Kalff was the very first head of design for Philips. And what’s kind of interesting is how his legacy is still a key part of, visible influence on, the identity. And he challenged Anton Philips back in 1925 by sending this letter.

This letter essentially said the advertising that Philips makes is not have the same standing and greatness in the importance of the company. In an edited way, he basically said, the advertising isn’t good enough. Hire me to come fix it. And the Philips wordmark at that point, there were 25 different versions of it.

And essentially the very first part of design at Philips, since it was a light bulb company, it all began with light, by unifying the entire visual identity. And he was around for a long time, working with some other great designers like Cassandra, who worked on the posters. And he also worked on the logo, which is stars, which represent light. And then also the waves, which represent communication. And today, data is the new light. And insights are the new communication. So it’s kind of come full circle in terms of its meaning as a health tech company, that’s looking at prediction and AI as a means of driving better care for more people.

So that was, like, the beginning. And, you know, you asked me like, what does it mean? And if I’m really transparent, you know, I’ve shown some vulnerability, you know, with my team and like, maybe like most high performance people, like it’s really scary. Like, I’ve had, I may have this facade that like, I’m on top of everything, but like, sometimes I fear I’m not worthy of this place in history.

And I, fear that I’ll mess up this huge legacy. ‘Cause I’m that eighth leader of design in Philips’ history. And Philips has probably won more awards than any design company in the history of the world, right? And so like sometimes the responsibility is pretty heavy. And I remind my team that I’m human and I’m trying to do my best to basically hold up to all of those great leaders over the past, you know, people like Stefano Marzano and Rainn Versema and Louis Kalff and Robert Bleich and, you know, Sean Carney, is like this long list of people that, really made a difference in influencing society.

Jesse: And I would think that in addition to your own standards for your performance that come from this legacy of previous leaders and previous accomplishments, there are also certain expectations that you’re feeling as well, given the history of design at Philips and the history of design’s influence at Philips.

And I wonder how those expectations, those perceptions of how design is meant to contribute at Philips, how that influences how you make decisions as a leader. 

Peter S.: I think that you’re inheriting this tradition, like, let’s talk about legacy first, right, that involves maintaining consistency and functionality in the design, brand unification, and a clear focus on empathy. I mean, Philips, is, like, the first company that invented ESG, like way back in 1920s Philips was doing tuberculosis screening for all of its employees and then for all of Eindhoven and then scaled that to all of the Netherlands and at the same time set up things like corporate housing and healthcare for all employees.

Like that didn’t exist back then. And disability insurance, like these things were really new. And, so I feel like what’s unique about Philips is that. there’s all this legacy, but care and empathy form the basis of how decisions and trade offs are made as we look at the next hundred years of our future.

‘Cause we, respect our legacy, but we have to look forward, you know, we can’t look backwards. And, I think that has a part of how we communicate, with leaders and partners and our employees and new hires, that is really different than the ethos that I found in Silicon Valley.

Peter M.: So you’re talking about looking forward. I’m curious what role design has played in Philips’s evolution and shifting, right? You mentioned it started with light bulbs. It’s now a health tech company. And what you are being tasked for in terms of that ongoing evolution, what role is design playing to drive change versus, maybe, enabling change.

‘Cause so often design can be seen as, you know, when it started at Philips, yes, it was brand. It was advertising. That’s not core value.

That’s, kind of, related value. Now, it feels like design is woven into more core value realization within Philips. And, I’m interested in the mechanisms by which that happens, by which you take part in that.

Peter S.: I mean, let’s talk about the evolution. So in the early years, twenties and thirties, you know, it was all about that visually identity and presenting a consistent visual identity. 

It’s funny, if you go back to Philips’s history, like, it wasn’t profitable for the first three years, like it was 18 93, And then they got a order for 50,000 light bulbs for the winter palace for the czar of Russia. Like that was the moment at which Philips became profitable. And people forget that there were hundreds of light bulb companies. Why did Philips survive and thrive for so long to become the innovation company that it is today?

And you have to go back to Gerard Philips, and Louis Kalff and many of the leaders, like today, even Roy Jacobs today, cares about the little things. No detail is small. Gerard Philips, I’ve had his notebook in my hands from 18 98. And there are extensive notes of everything that was going on in the shop floor.

So this is a place where the leaders are really into the details. I’m expected to know about everything on every project. You know, it’s an almost impossible task given the scale of the company, but, the ethos of leadership here is that you’re not a manager. You have to be a designer first or actually deeply participate in whatever your role is.

Individual contributor work may be five or 10 percent of my time, but I do get involved in individual, you know, contributions. And I think that at a lot of large leadership positions, it becomes a lot more managerial or role based and, you know, we’re really about rolling our sleeves up and caring about those details, and you lead by example.

So it started with that visual identity, where there was this history of leaders being involved in the details. And then, you know, from the 40s to the 80s, you know, is really a transition to product design. And we’re talking about consumer products, domestic appliances, and then, you know this design evolved with Knut Rahn and Robert Bleich into doing centralized design leadership, evolved to a point where there was a design and review process that became the model for many other large corporate companies at the time. 

They even had this like giant round table with like a Lazy Susan in it. They would put, like, products down on top of it and evaluate every detail and decide, like, yes, we have to change this. This isn’t ready to go. This has to go back. And of course, a lot of that was industrial design focus. And so huge transition from, you know, an industrial company making light bulbs at scale, to products that it was aesthetics as it relates to self-esteem.

And then the connection from there to doing things like personal shavers and grooming, where it really had an impact on how people felt about themselves and I think that, you know, if you look at companies, it was only Sony and Braun that had that level of design orchestration that was occurring centrally at the time, where design wasn’t just a part of the organization that was like an agency producing work by order from the businesses, but this was a role that was an equal product stakeholder at the table. Which is very different than how d