Two stops over: Craft, silence and the leadership no curriculum teaches
Manuel Nogueira, photographer, filmmaker and Chief Executive Officer of Matter + Energy, has shot for publications including Vogue, Elle and Nowness. As the company's CEO, he believes craft has taught him much more about leadership than any business school ever could.
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The first time I ruined a roll of film on purpose, I was twenty, and trying to overexpose a portrait by two stops because a photographer I admired had said something about blown highlights being more honest than clean ones.
Craft teaches you a specific thing that business school can't simulate.
The image came back wrecked. Unusable. I stared at it for a long time in the darkroom, and I think that's where I started learning how to lead, though it took me another twenty years to realise it.
Craft teaches you a specific thing that business school can't simulate: what it feels like to commit to a decision before you know if it's right. You set the exposure. You cut the shot. You choose the lens. Then you wait, and the material tells you whether your instinct held. There's no undo, no deck to revise, no committee to distribute the blame across. The feedback loop is physical, and it's honest in a way that quarterly reviews never manage to be.
Above: Life, work and backstage images photographed by Manuel Nogueira
I spent two decades as a photographer and filmmaker before I ended up running an agency. I shot for Vogue, Elle, Nowness. I directed campaigns for Spotify, Netflix, Dove. The path to CEO was not planned, and I wouldn't recommend it as a career strategy, but I keep noticing that the things I rely on most in leadership didn't come from any management framework.
I keep noticing that the things I rely on most in leadership didn't come from any management framework.
Instead, they came from sets, editing suites, complex productions, on-set discussions about quality, team management in guerrilla sets, or the same thing in huge productions… and long, long hours in rooms, on roads, at the top of buildings, wherever something was being made and nobody was sure yet whether it would work.
Editing teaches you that the cut is an act of restraint. What you leave out creates the rhythm more than what you leave in. I run meetings this way now, probably annoyingly: I'm always asking what we can remove; what's the one image that holds the brief; what would happen if we cut the first three slides entirely. The discipline of subtraction came from the timeline, not from a leadership book.
Above: A photographer or director's job is to hold the frame, which is really about concentrating on what matters [Image from Getty Images].
Directing teaches you something harder. On a set, your job is to hold the frame, which means holding the tension between what you want and what the room is giving you. The best take is almost never the one you planned, it's the one where the actor did something you didn't expect, or the light shifted, or the timing went sideways and landed somewhere better.
Most conversations about judgment make it sound cerebral, when the thing is actually somatic.
The skill is in recognising that moment when it arrives, which means you have to be paying a specific kind of attention - not to your plan but to what's actually happening. I think that's what people mean when they talk about judgment in leadership. Except most conversations about judgment make it sound cerebral, when the thing is actually somatic. You feel the right take before you can explain it.
Photography taught me framing, which is really an argument about what matters. Every frame excludes more than it includes. That exclusion is the point. It's a position. When I look at a brief now, or a strategy, or a team structure, I'm always thinking about the frame, what are we choosing to see and what are we choosing to ignore, and is that choice deliberate or just inherited.
Above: AI promises speed and volume, but "waiting is the part that makes the image yours. And the errors. And the scarcity." [Image from Getty Images]
I love philosophy. It’s in my DNA. My father used to teach it in university, it was part of my development as a person. Byung-Chul Han wrote "capitalism doesn't like silence". Silence is the zero point of production, the place where nothing is being generated and nothing is being optimised. I think about this when I watch how the industry is absorbing AI.
The promise is speed, volume, elimination of the gap. But the gap is where craft lives. The waiting. The uncertainty. The hours where you don't yet know what the image will be. A darkroom can't give you one more take. You wait and it gives you what it gives you, and the waiting is the part that makes the image yours. And the errors. And the scarcity.
I worry that we're training a generation of creative leaders who have never experienced that kind of structural patience and intelligence on resources. When every prompt returns an output in seconds, latency starts to feel like failure. 'Still working' flashes on the screen, and we register it as a breach of contract. The zero point becomes intolerable.
The [AI] promise is speed, volume, elimination of the gap. But the gap is where craft lives. The waiting. The uncertainty.
But craft disciplines wire you differently. They teach you to stay in the room when the room has no answers yet. They teach you that not knowing is not a weakness, it's the condition from which real decisions emerge. The photographer who hasn't seen the contact sheet yet, the editor who hasn't found the cut yet, the director who knows the scene isn't working but can't yet say why. All of them are practicing a form of leadership that no curriculum teaches; the discipline of tolerating ambiguity long enough for clarity to arrive on its own terms.
The ad industry has a habit of promoting people away from making. You get good at craft, so they move you into management. You get good at management, so they move you into strategy. Each promotion takes you further from the room where things happen. I think that distance is the real leadership crisis; not AI, not market pressures, not generational shifts, but the distance between the person making the decision and the last time they made something with their hands.
I still shoot. I still make things. Not enough to satisfy myself, but enough to remember what the material feels like when it doesn't cooperate. That friction is the thing. The process is the thing. The rest is just administration.
