The craft of creative leadership today, from the darkroom out

Manuel Nogueira interviewed on taste, authorship and staying close to the craft.

An interview from the Cultural Innovators series, about leading a creative company after two decades behind cameras. The short version follows, the questions closest to what this house believes. The full conversation is linked at the end.

How has your background in photography and filmmaking shaped the way you work and lead, and how do you connect that creative experience to your role as a CEO?

The moment under the red light, as a photograph appears in front of you, is something you never forget. It is magical. Hands in the water, the sour tang of fixer, no sleep. You would watch an image take longer than you wanted, and you would learn the only useful thing: how to stay in a room when you do not yet know what you have, trusting that magic is about to happen. That training was not called leadership at the time. It was not called anything.

Business leaders with administration backgrounds got handed a different muscle. They got taught how to compress decisions. The artist's training is the opposite. You learn to wait for the image, you learn to notice what is actually happening on the surface, because the surface tells the truth about what happened underneath, and you develop a tolerance for not knowing that turns out to be the thing the job actually needs.

I came into this role at Matter through the side door. No business pedigree. My partners saw it before I did. It still feels like a strange sentence to write. But the connection between making something with your hands and running a creative organization is real for me. They are the same gesture, at different scales. You set the conditions, you control the variables you can, and the chemistry comes out with its own opinion. The CEO part is just the darkroom at a different size.

What that means in practice: I try to not intervene in the work anymore. I intervene in the conditions for the work. That is a different muscle from being the photographer, director or artist in the room. Most leaders forget this and become the bottleneck. I am trying not to, by building a team with special skills. Sometimes I fail in keeping the right people, and sometimes I miss the bottleneck.

In a world of constant content and noise, what role does taste play, and why does it matter more than ever?

Average is free now. You can produce average copy, average design, average music, average decks, in seconds, and it is good, it raised the floor. So the only premium left is the thing that average cannot touch, and that is taste. By which I do not mean preference. Anyone has preference. Taste is the judgment forged through thousands of hours of friction with material that resists you. It lives in the body before it reaches the mind. You cannot shortcut it, and you cannot prompt for it.

The half I had wrong: taste alone does not build reputation anymore, at the speed that matters. AI made execution abundant, and it also made good work, on its own, quietly insufficient. You can produce careful, beautiful, quiet work and still disappear. Welcome to 2026. What builds reputation now is authored work. Work that is visibly made by someone, whose authorship is recognized in public. The work, and the author of the work, in the same frame.

Autoridade vem de autor. Authority comes from the author.

There is an etymology I really like, in Portuguese and English the same. Same root. The author is the one who generates the thing, gives it life, cares for it to exist. Authority is a residue of authorship. It is what is left in the room after you have signed enough things that held. The authority we are trying to build at MATTER is the authority of the work's authors. Leaders who appear because their work made them visible. The work speaks first. The reputation follows, in that order.

How does craft and your personal creative signature connect to the business side of what you do?

Signature is what is left over after you remove everything that could have been made by anyone. That is how I think about it. In photography or film direction you learn this fast. Your way, your pursuit, the mistakes you make, the ones you live with. That accumulation is the signature. Nobody can reverse-engineer it from the outside, because half of it is the things you refused to do.

A lot of the daily work is just refusing to optimize the wrong things. Refusing to make a deck that is correct but cold. Refusing to send an email that performs warmth instead of being warm. Refusing to onboard a client who does not want any friction in the work. That is the signature, weirdly. It is mostly a series of refusals.

What is your personal philosophy, and how does it shape the way you work, live, and lead?

I believe in strangeness as a life strategy. Not a brand strategy. Life. The world will try to flatten you, edit you, iron out your weird, and I think your weird is the thread that holds the soul of your work together. So: stay strange, on purpose. Most things that mattered to me started as too quiet, too slow, too tender, too much. I have never trusted the people who showed up already polished.

In leadership specifically: I try now to lead through the leaders. I do not go around them. I intervene in the conditions, the hires, the framing, the noes. I give credit specifically and constantly, because credit is one of the few currencies that has not been inflated yet. I tell people when something is not landing in the same breath as I tell them when it is. Most leadership advice is performance. The actual thing is mostly attention. And the connection with and between people has to be real, otherwise it affects the whole system and it does not work.

How important is it to stay close to the craft and still make things today?

It is not optional for me. If I stop making things, I start hallucinating. I still photograph, direct music videos and films, I have a music project, I write. These are not hobbies. They are the same impulse as the company, processed through different materials. They are how I keep the muscles honest. If you stop sitting with material that resists you, you forget what resistance feels like, and then you start treating ideas the way managers do, as things to push through. They are things to wait with.

My son is ten years old. He is learning piano. He went from Einaudi to Aerosmith to the Zelda theme without telling himself he had to pick a register. I watch him do that and I think the only useful thing I have to offer him as a father is to never become the kind of person who would tell him to pick.

The work I am still proudest of is mostly small. A portrait of someone. A song that almost no one knows. One scene inside a commercial that carries the excellence of the whole team. The habits. The moments held with intention. That is the bar.