Jesse James Garrett

In a world full of “zero-to-one” leaders, stepping into ownership of a century-old legacy is a completely different kind of leadership challenge.

Peter Skillman is the latest design leader to take on that challenge for Philips, and his insights on the latest episode of our design leadership podcast Finding Our Way have meaningful implications even if you’re not inheriting a hundred years of expectations.

Old companies have the luxury of thinking on longer time scales. They don’t always exercise that luxury, mind you, but when they do, they can sometimes make strategic moves others can’t see.

Organizations are living entities, and their needs change as they evolve. That means what they need from design changes as well. Peter describes the evolution of design’s influence at Philips as an ongoing re-evaluation of where design can deliver the most value.

Evolving design’s value proposition means evolving the value proposition of the design leader as well. As Peter describes it, the need for exploratory innovation that shaped design’s influence in the early 21st century asked for a certain kind of design leader: visionary and risk-taking.

With business’s collective comfort with digital technologies growing over the last 25 years, though, the need to drive new ideas has given way to the need to really understand how to make those ideas real, in a pragmatic and necessarily risk-sensitive way. “There are tons of expensive vision projects that don’t belong in a modern company,” he says.

So we now have an execution-focused business value proposition for design, but a generation of leaders who have been optimized by their experiences to deliver a whole different kind of value. It’s no wonder so many design leaders feel a mismatch with the expectations coming from executives.

Peter’s recommendation is to keep evolving your own value proposition as a leader. “You have to reframe failure,” he says. “You have to break the rules. You have to shut your mouth and listen and learn and focus on others and not yourself. And doing all that simultaneously is really hard. And I’m still learning.”

Thanks Peter (and Peter Merholz too!) for taking us along on your learning journey!