Creative Tension

How does Corning do it?

Corning has an R&D process that combines freedom and discipline. Scientists and their managers have ample room to exercise their curiosity and judgment, but they are accountable for their time every month. Just because there's flexibility doesn't mean there isn't rigor. Corning is constantly balancing the demand for short-term development of existing products against the need for long-term projects. Everyone at the company knows that it took two decades for optical fiber to become an important product. Everyone also knows that it currently supports the entire enterprise.

Once an idea shows promise, a formal five-step innovation process -- a process that everyone knows and understands -- ensures that good ideas get the attention and resources that they need to become products, and to progress briskly. The process also ensures that people eventually stop working on ideas that aren't panning out.

Corning believes that in R&D, people are as important as science. And in some ways, because technical competence at Sullivan Park is assumed, human relations in the lab are even more important than science. People play specific roles in projects -- including the role of "champion" for an idea -- and people play specific roles at Sullivan Park, roles that they often discover themselves.

Corning's scientific creativity connects to Corning's businesses in a very simple way: talk. Not only is there no wall between R&D and the business units, there is a constant tidal flow of unmanaged communication about problems and opportunities. This communication takes place between factories and researchers, and between individual scientists and individual business managers. Necessity is, in fact, often the mother of invention.

Corning assumes that creativity and a scientist's sense of well-being are intimately linked -- and that well-being goes far beyond compensation and a refrigerator filled with free sodas. At Corning, well-being involves things like the ability to get equipment and lab space -- a clear validation of scientific judgment.

Corning scientists transmit and reinterpret their own culture by constantly telling each other stories of their successes and failures. People at Corning know the legendary story of the company's first dramatic innovation, which involved railroad signal lanterns, a primitive form of communication using glass and light that foreshadowed fiber optics. Donald Keck, one of the three inventors of optical fiber, is now a senior manager and research fellow at Sullivan Park.

At the front lines, eggplant-headed Echeverr?a carries Corning's flag with her own sense of style. Unlike most managers, she believes that it is her job to adapt her management to the individual personalities of her scientists, rather than the other way around. In that sense, every single person in her group has a different boss -- ideally, exactly the best boss for that person at that moment.

And Echeverr?a is not afraid of the quirky, moody humanity of her scientists -- she revels in it. "I believe in being in close touch with people as human beings," she says. "I can tell you about the family situation of every one of the people who work for me. I know what kind of work environment suits them. I can see when someone is not motivated."

One of Echeverr?a's distinctive tools is a simple, though uncommon, workplace question: "I am always walking into someone's office and saying to that person, 'How does it feel?' How does it feel -- in this project? In life? I have this conversation often with people, and not just people whose performance concerns me."

She has learned not just to ask the question, but to listen to, and handle, the answers. "I don't want to blind myself into thinking that my perspective is the only valid one. Those conversations keep me on my toes."

Miracles of Glass (I)

Standard optical fiber, used in the lines that carry telephone conversations and email, is made of some of the purest material not just on Earth, but in the universe.

Consider ordinary window glass: If you stack up three feet of window panes, only a hazy aqua light seeps through. In contrast, the glass used for optical fiber is so clear that if the world's oceans were replaced with optical-fiber glass, the bottom of even the deepest seas would be clearly visible to people at the surface.

Optical-fiber glass, says Corning senior research associate Dana Bookbinder, "is clearer than the air you are looking through."