He was also highly active in the affairs of the powerful American Society of Cinematographers.Foreign directors often wanted to work with him. (Cortez lit colour films as dramatically as he lit black-and-white and his arriving scenes are easily spotted.)The cinematographer had one strong ally in Susan Hayward who admired the way he had photographed her as the alcoholic night-club singer of Smash-up, the Story of a Woman (1947), and successfully requested him for Top Secret Affair (1957), Thunder in the Sun (1959) and Back Street (1961).Like John Alton, another often aggravating perfectionist, Cortez wrote about his craft, providing a definitive essay on motion picture photography for the Encyclopedia Britannica. "He was a very nice man, but he had a problem; he thought he had all the time in the world on a big picture," said the director Robert Aldrich, explaining why Cortez was removed from the 1954 Burt Lancaster western Apache after a week. With Ambersons, it stands as the greatest testament to Cortez's skill.Gaining occasional plum assignments, Cortez was apt to exhaust the patience of producers. Quite remarkable but hopelessly uncommercial, The Night of the Hunter has subsequently won recognition as a masterpiece.

Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952) in Supercinecolor at least renewed his acquaintance with Charles Laughton, reduced to playing Kidd. Cortez had first worked with Laughton in Paris on the thriller The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949), battling with the new Ansco Colour process.When Laughton made his directorial debut on The Night of the Hunter (1955), he insisted on having Cortez and together they devised the film's antiquated, dreamlike, expressionistic look so appropriate to its bizarre Depression- era story of a religious fanatic (Robert Mitchum) terrorising two small children. There he learnt much as a camera operator, working with some of the masters of light and helping design and execute some of the amazing shots in Busby Berkeley musical numbers.After Ambersons, which gained him an Academy Award nomination, Cortez worked for the leading independent producers David O Selznick and Walter Wanger. He shot most of Selznick's 1944 home-front epic Since You Went Away (and was Oscar-nominated again) before becoming a war cinematographer, working with the directors Frank Capra and John Huston.In the 1950s he toiled on many minor pictures, often required to handle inferior colour systems. He gained work at the Paramount studios in New York and went to Hollywood with his brother, the film star Ricardo Cortez.

He had begun working in New York as an assistant to eminent portrait photographers of the day. The scene ends in an achingly beautiful shot of Dolores Costello in silhouette staring lovingly after the departing Joseph Cotten.Before Ambersons, Cortez had been shooting B pictures at Universal, including thrillers where he had experimented in photographic effects. Cortez was a master at recreating outdoor lighting on the sound stage, as in the strong shadows of the snow scenes, actually filmed inside an ice plant to create the right atmosphere.His most stunning sequence in the film is that of the "last great ball" in which the camera follows actors into the mansion (a series of ceilinged sets) and is continually on the move, elaborately reframing the action, often in deep focus. Filmed in a softer style than the bombastic Kane to suit its nostalgic portrait of a vanished era, Ambersons is still as visually daring and just as intoxicating to watch. Like Orson Welles, for whom he photographed The Magnificent Ambersons, Stanley Cortez was for most of his career at odds with the Hollywood system. His perfectionism, his insistence not only in making dramatic use of light, shade and colour but taking his time about it, may have turned off the major studios but he has long been held in the highest esteem by other cinematographers and film historians. The Magnificent Ambersons came in 1942, a year after Citizen Kane.

Stanislaus Kranz (Stanley Cortez), cinematographer: born New York 4 November 1908; died Los Angeles 23 December 1997. In short, it is expressed in the "extra spirit, competence and self-belief".Such businesses have escaped from the overly simplistic view of human motivation traditionally espoused by economists to realise that "business is about three-dimensional man, with a richer range of motivations and desires than rational economic man".. It is there in the atmosphere of certain organisations - the way the receptionist treats you like a guest, the way in which employees talk animatedly about the organisation. But Mr Goyder insists that he sees signs of the thinking catching hold.

But what evidence does Mr Goyder see for organisations genuinely becoming enthused about this way of doing business?"Already in the short time since the Centre for Tomorrow's Company was formed in 1996, we have learned the value of a forum which allows leaders to fuel their restlessness and to indulge their thirst for new ideas," he says, adding that the organisation is, for example, working to encourage the investment community to look at different methods of analysis and keen to get business school students thinking about the principles underlying lasting success.The participating companies in the Tomorrow's Company inquiry, which include the likes of IBM, Blue Circle, Cable & Wireless and NatWest, have not always been able to live up to every aspect of the inclusive approach. According to the book, more than a third of companies that topped the profitability league tables between 1979 and 1989 had collapsed by 1990.Clearly, leadership - of a very special kind - is needed to steer organisations away from the traps that have historically caught them. Many companies have missed opportunities and increased their risks through "excessive reliance on inherited success measures". Indeed, focus on the bottom line has consistently been found to be one of the most illusory of management tools. It is all obvious enough, but as Mr Goyder adds, "most companies miss getting the obvious things right".This is because they assume all sorts of things, from people knowing what their goals are to knowing that what they have always measured will be appropriate for the future. This means taking the trouble to understand the needs of each business partner and then meeting these needs in a balanced way."More specifically, there are five essential stages - define purpose and values, review key relationships, define success, measure and communicate performance and reward and reinforce. "Each company has to work out for itself what it has to do to succeed and what needs to be measured.