Tom Matano was my mentor and a legend.

The Mazda Miata. The RX-7. Cars so beautifully resolved that rainwater didn’t just run off them, it followed the surface like it had somewhere it wanted to go.

Every curve was a decision.
Every line was intentional.

You didn’t just look at his cars.
You felt them.

And then he walked away from all of that to teach.

The most important thing he ever gave me wasn’t a lesson about cars.
It was a way of thinking about people.

I remember showing him my work and waiting for a verdict.

Instead he’d sit back, pause, and ask:
“What were you trying to feel when you drew this line?”

I’d leave the room without an answer.
Just a better question, rattling around in my head.

Frustrated at first.
Grateful, for the rest of my career.

What I took from Tom wasn’t a framework or a methodology.
It was a posture.

He never pointed me toward the answer.
He trusted that I already had the reasoning inside me, and that his job was to surface it, not replace it.

That changed how I saw leadership entirely.

When I stepped into my first leadership role, I said something on day one that made a few people visibly uncomfortable.

“My goal is to make myself not needed here, as fast as possible.”

Some laughed.
Some thought it was a line.

It wasn’t.

I stopped making decisions for people who were capable of making them.

I built a shared way of thinking:
what questions do we ask before committing to a direction?
How do we know when a decision is reversible or not?

I put that thinking into the environment, so it didn’t have to live in my head.

Then I stepped back.

To outsiders, it looked like I was doing nothing.
My calendar looked suspiciously free.

That was the point.

The highest form of leadership is making yourself unnecessary.

Not because you’ve checked out.
Because you’ve already done the real work:
designing how your team thinks, not what they think.

When someone owns a decision, truly owns it, they defend it, learn from it, and carry it forward.

When they implement yours, none of that happens.

You just did their development for them and called it leadership.

Tom never did my thinking for me.
He just kept asking until I did it myself.

That’s the thing I try to pass on now.

Not answers.
Not direction.

Just the belief that the person in front of me already has what they need.

Not the work you touched.
The thinking you leave behind.

I only understood much later that Tom wasn’t just teaching design.

He was practising the oldest method of teaching there is.

Socrates never lectured.
He asked.

Because knowledge you arrive at yourself takes root in a way that handed-down answers never do.

The question is not a softer version of the answer. It is a different act entirely.

Tom knew this.
He just never said it out loud.

Every session in that studio was proof of it.

You left not with his conclusion but with your own.

The answers he could have given me would have been useful once, in that room, for that drawing.

The questions he asked instead have followed me into every room since.

“Always inspired.”

That was Tom Matano’s lifelong salutation.

The most generous thing a mentor ever modelled for me.

Photo from his memorial in October 2025, courtesy of Antonio Borja.