Creative Tension

Corning is a revealing example of the promise of ideas -- and the power of creativity. The company's 1,200 researchers are divided into 10 core-technology groups (glass is one), and together, those people are responsible for inventing the future that keeps Corning's 33,000 workers employed. Corning doesn't just celebrate its 149-year history of invention -- it embraces it. Its research furnaces still churn out 100 kinds of experimental glass a day.

In 1998, 57% of the company's sales were from products less than four years old. In 1999, 78% of sales were from products less than four years old, and Corning predicts that 78% of this year's sales will also come from products less than four years old. Corning chairman and CEO Roger Ackerman, 61, speaks without hesitation of his company, which generated less than $5 billion in sales last year, generating $20 billion a year by 2004 or 2005. That would require about 30% annual growth -- all, as it happens, from products that don't exist yet. But Wall Street is betting on Corning's creativity. The company's stock, which was trading for less than $25 per share in 1998, was trading at more than $300 per share earlier this year. And Corning planned a three-for-one stock split for this October.

Still, there's no room for coasting. Optical transmission and networking is an area crowded with high-talent players: JDs Uniphase, Lucent, Nortel, and others. In that environment -- creativity at the speed of light -- Corning's frontline R&D managers have to have spot-on scientific judgment, as well as the nerves of a craps player and the psychological insight of a therapist. The science and the stomach for taking a bet aren't much good without an understanding of the scientists who will invent the company's future, and an understanding of what motivates and frustrates them.

The process of creativity also reveals the perfect paradox of modern business: Truly creative people can't be managed, at least not in the conventional, cubicle sense. Yet if creative people are not managed well -- even brilliantly -- the result is disaster: The creative people are unproductive, or grumpy, or, worse still, gone. Ideas dry up, competitors close in, and a company can end up shriveling. The folks at Apple and Intel understand that. The folks at AT&T, Lucent, Mattel, and Procter & Gamble are still grappling with it.

At Corning, sustained creativity is as much a part of the culture as glass itself (the company's NYSE symbol is GLW -- "glassworks"). Corning glassblowers made the first successful lightbulbs for Thomas Edison, and the company went on to invent the machine that mass-produced lightbulbs, making electric light available to ordinary people. But Corning no longer makes lightbulbs.

Corning invented the technology to mass-produce color-TV tubes out of glass, and it owned the market so thoroughly that the company had to negotiate a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department in the 1950s. But Corning doesn't make many conventional color-TV tubes these days.

Corning used to make almost all of the thermometer glass in the country -- including the glass for medical thermometers -- and it invented the technology that allows dishes to go from freezer to oven to table (and invented the process for applying those floral patterns too). But Corning no longer makes thermometer glass or dishes.

In a breathless e-world where plenty of companies -- Cisco, Lucent, and Sprint, for starters -- lay claim to building, powering, or running the Internet, Corning invented the one piece of technology without which there would be no Internet: optical fiber.

Corning invents something, Corning invents a way of producing that invention, and eventually other companies copy Corning and run it out of that business. Then Corning reinvents itself.

"That culture," says Ackerman, "has been passed down in the company from generation to generation. It's a style, creating the atmosphere that says, 'We really want you to innovate.' " Ackerman doesn't just want people to innovate; he needs them to.

As with lightbulbs and TV tubes, optical fiber is transforming human society -- and transforming Corning. As lightbulbs and TV tubes once did, optical fiber dominates the company's revenue, and its profits. Fiber is tomorrow. But everyone at Corning knows that fiber is not forever. Something "up on the hill" -- at Corning's vast Sullivan Park R&D campus in Erwin, New York -- is the real future.

Corning has had an R&D lab since 1908, and the company has had plenty of time to study and routinize the process of innovation. In fact, Corning's success at managing that process is the only reason the company is still around. Indeed, successfully managing creativity is as much the "core technology" of Corning as Pyrex, Corning Ware, or LEAF optical fiber.