Creative Tension

The hair is hard to overlook. It's short, stylish, and artfully done, but distinctly purple. Except among skateboarders and in dance clubs, purple hair is pretty uncommon. In a respectable corporate setting where people spend time talking about benchmarks, annual-performance objectives, and 360-degree feedback, purple hair is truly scarce. When you cross that corporate setting with an advanced scientific-research institution -- where people wear lab coats, talk about quantum dots, and browse chemical catalogs looking for interesting molecules -- people with purple hair are as hard to find as neutrinos.

Throw in the fact that Lina Echeverr?a, 50, is guardian of one of the great scientific traditions of America -- she is director of glass and glass ceramics at the storied glass-research lab at Corning Inc. -- and the purple hair is truly striking. How does a woman who is a scientist, a colleague, and a pivotal corporate manager maintain credibility with purple hair -- no matter how stylishly it's done?

"Usually it's more eggplant," says Echeverr?a. "Aubergine. A.J., my hairdresser, I give him all the freedom. It's fun, no?"

Echeverr?a is an unlikely occupant of her office -- an energetic, elfin, Colombian woman who started her career tramping through the jungles of South America studying ancient lavas. And she brings an unlikely management style to Corning, a company (1999 revenues: $4.7 billion) whose history spans three centuries and whose early customers included Thomas Edison. Echeverr?a heads an unruly group of 45 researchers -- 25 PhD scientists and another 20 technicians and support personnel -- who make up the glass and glass-ceramics research group. The group works to understand existing glass, invent new kinds of glass, and improve the performance of pulled glass -- Corning's modern signature product, optical fiber. To say that Echeverr?a is those people's boss, which is how the company would explain it, is laughable.

One of her group's top scientists, Nick Borrelli, 63, is also one of Corning's most senior researchers. "I don't really report to anybody," he says. "I don't care who my boss is. I can't be managed. I can just be suppressed and frustrated."

Adam Ellison, 39, a senior research scientist who also works in the glass-research group, has been at Corning for only four years. Not long after arriving, he stumbled onto a new kind of glass that he thought might be valuable in Corning's booming fiber-optics business. "I proposed the idea," says Ellison, "and it was shot down. They said, 'Don't work on that. We want you to focus on this.'

"I ignored them, and it led to that." Ellison points to a spool of finished antimony-silicate optical fiber, a developmental product now sending ripples of excitement through Corning's research and business divisions. "We need cowboys, and I'm a cowboy."

Echeverr?a was part of the glass-research group at Corning for seven years before becoming a manager. "I have the group that is regarded as the hardest to manage," she says. "These scientists speak their minds. Their job is to be skeptical and to challenge the system. How can we pay them to do that, then not expect them to do the same with the human system that they are a part of? They don't have much use for people like me -- not me in particular, but this job. And often, they are right."

Listening to Echeverr?a talk through the two jobs that she is asked to perform is dizzying, because they flatly contradict each other.

Job one: Keep the scientists happy. "Scientists, like any other human beings, perform best when they are driven by inspiration," says Echeverr?a. "It's the same in an artist or a scientist. We depend on their creativity. I tell my guys, If you think something is really important, follow your heart. It energizes you, and you give your best performance. That's how you get scientists on a roll -- what for athletes is called 'being in the zone.' "

Job two: Keep Corning happy. After all, the company spends $2 million a day on R&D, and it holds Echeverr?a accountable for her piece of that -- Corning crumbles if there is not ultimately a payoff many times that investment. "People do have a lot of freedom, but that doesn't mean you can get away with murder," Echeverr?a explains. "This is not just a green field where you can run in whatever direction you want. As a group, our performance is evaluated first and foremost on results."

It's hard to imagine a more pointed expression of the central conundrum facing companies, leaders, and rank-and-file workers. In an economy built on ideas, the way to outcompete your rivals is to outcreate your rivals. Creativity is the central force behind growth and success -- it is the source of new products, new ways of working, satisfied employees, and constant renewal, not to mention profits and a soaring stock price. But how do you create creativity?