Creative Tension

Bookbinder has a wide-ranging intellectual appetite. While at Corning, he has worked on both the U.S. Olympic bobsled and the performance of Geoff Bodine's race cars. His cheerful gabbiness and eagerness to explain complicated science in simple terms can obscure the fact that the work he does is well beyond the reach of ordinary people.

When he was at GE Plastics, Bookbinder helped invent the form of Lexan plastic that makes compact discs cheap and easy to mass-produce. ("My mother tells people I invented the CD -- I wish.") At Corning, just last year, he had a flash of insight that allowed the company's fiber factories to increase their productivity by a significant percentage -- enough to show up in the company's per-share earnings a couple of quarters later -- at a time when every Corning fiber factory was running at 100% of capacity, with orders waiting to be filled. (Technically, Bookbinder is not even part of the fiber-optic research groups; he's assigned to the biochemistry core-technology group.)

Over the past few years, working for the company that invented Pyrex, Bookbinder invented a new kind of plastic labware that is accelerating the drug-discovery process at pharmaceutical companies.

And yet, it is as much Bookbinder's gregariousness as his scientific insight that serves Corning so well. Bookbinder is the yenta of Sullivan Park. He is a tireless gossip who arrives at Sullivan Park around 8:00 or 8:15 every morning, but he rarely reaches his office until after 9:30, because he's chatting with people as he wanders around. He knows what dozens of his colleagues are working on, have worked on, and wish that they were working on.

Far from being an idle pastime or simple nosiness, Bookbinder-as-yenta is a vital part of the Sullivan Park R&D operation, a one-man knowledge-exchange system of unusual capacity, insight, and weak jokes.

So he bumped into a guy one day doing work on a certain kind of filter made of thin layers of material laid down on high-quality glass. "I said, 'How are you? What problems are you working on?' " The guy did have a problem: When Corning went to cut the painstakingly prepared glass sandwiches into filters, the glass tended to shatter, scattering small shards everywhere.

"They were taking this perfect thing, putting a diamond saw to it, and ruining it," says Bookbinder. As it happened, he knew of a fluid that binds to glass, but that doesn't stick to anything else. He suggested that if the scientist used that fluid while cutting, it would keep the glass from flying into shards.

And how did he know about that fluid? Well, he happened to be talking to another scientist not so long ago . . .

Bookbinder got on an elevator with an acquaintance one day, asked his trademark question -- "What's your hardest problem?" -- and ended up getting off with the scientist to help him bang out a solution and provide some contacts. Often, Bookbinder gets as much help from these apparently casual conversations as he gives.

How did last year's dramatic breakthrough for the company's optical-fiber factories happen? "Well," says Bookbinder, "a friend and I were shooting the breeze, talking about work. I had some chemistry thing I was showing him. I was saying, 'What can we do with it?' " Six months later, the factories had implemented the change that resulted from that conversation.

Bookbinder's meandering curiosity is not a personal quality that Corning has always appreciated. He was one of the first midcareer scientists to be hired at Sullivan Park. (He and his wife, Andrea, who is now a chemical engineer at Sullivan Park, had been at ge Plastics for nine years.) "Frankly, the experience was not particularly pleasurable for the first couple years," says Bookbinder. "I have a very aggressive personality, a very assertive personality, and they didn't know what to do with me. They were treating me like a classic new hire--a young scientist who didn't really know much."

Bookbinder says that in nine years at Corning, he's only had one worthwhile direct supervisor--his current one. "The thing I value most is my freedom," he says. "I'm very cooperative. But if someone tells me that what I'm doing has no value, that I'm working on the wrong things--and we've got 10 patents and product going out the door--well, I'm going to keep right on doing what I'm doing."

Partly because of the larger culture at Corning, partly because of the senior management at Sullivan Park, and partly because of Bookbinder's own personal temperament and goals, he didn't really worry about what his immediate bosses thought. "Dana was the earliest midcareer hire we did," says David Morse, who was once one of Bookbinder's senior managers. "We needed to learn to hire people like that--to preserve what's good at Corning and maximize what's new. When Dana came here, I said, 'This is what I see as your potential, here's how we manage your career to do that, and here's why that will be fun.' "