What Jobs can teach lighting

When Steve Jobs died recently, it was easy to speculate that his demise would have resonated with the lighting industry more than most. Perhaps it was the way his products melded engineering with beautiful aesthetics, or his talent for delivering watershed technology, but it would take an unimaginative manager or product designer not to wonder what the man in the turtleneck would have done for lighting.

You could argue that, as manufacturers search for new form factors for LED luminaires and lamps, our sector stands at a similar intersection to the one that faced Jobs when he battled Bill Gates to develop the definitive personal computer. With that in mind, I’ve decided to look at five things lighting could learn from Steve Jobs:

1. Design and the work ethic: You’d struggle to compile a collection of Jobs quotations without lingering on the D-word but the late entrepreneur spoke about good design as something that was born of hard work rather than instantaneous flair. “To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that.”

2. Make something new: OLED and LED luminaire developers take note. The success of products like the iPod and iPad proves that you can create new categories from the bottom up, without referring to old form factors. “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups,” Jobs said. “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

3. Communication: It’s no good being a visionary if nobody in your business has any idea what the vision is. Jobs succeeded in making Apple the most coherent and clearly-identifiable brand in the world by successfully communicating his message to every member of staff. An insider told Fortune magazine: “You can ask anyone in the company what Steve wants and you’ll get an answer, even if 90 per cent of them have never met Steve.”

4. Don’t be afraid to steal: This oughtn’t to be taken as carte blanche for intellectual theft but rather as an invitation to be influenced by wider culture. Jobs once said the process for designing the Apple Macintosh came down to “trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you’re doing.” He also accused Microsoft of having no taste “because they don’t bring much culture into their products”.

5. Add mystique to the marketing: You might have noticed a self-aggrandising tone to most of the homilies above. As evidenced by the reaction to his death, Jobs succeeded in creating a mystique around himself and his products. When he was developing the first Mac, he wrapped prototypes under a blanket before whipping them away like a theatre impresario for the ‘big reveal’. Please note that this might not work for the latest electronic ballast.

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