Creative Tension

Human relations--teamwork, ability to take criticism, ability to mentor, ability to entertain other points of view--is a very large part of the researchers' performance reviews. "If I were technically brilliant, but a jerk," says Ellison, "I wouldn't last too long here. I'm an extrovert. People often say that your greatest asset can also be your greatest weakness. Being an extrovert is my greatest asset--and my greatest weakness.

"And that very point was in my last performance review--that the way for me to enhance my performance here at Corning was to be more cautious about how people react to me. To give them time to speak their minds. I suspect that's the most common kind of issue in discussing people's performance--not, 'You need to learn more about optical physics.' "

The other challenge of managing creativity--whether you're dealing with people who write Hallmark greeting cards or people at Sullivan Park--is deciding how to measure and reward productivity. "I regard research as a low-probability enterprise," says Ellison. "I melt something, I get all excited about it, but I don't think I'm going to be shipping a product anytime soon. I gird myself for disappointment every day, because I know that only 1%, or maybe 3%, of my effort will ever pay off." Credibility, which comes slowly, is won by having good ideas, playing them out, helping colleagues, and eventually coming up with something useful.

"Huge numbers of ideas wind up going nowhere," says Ellison. "Once in a while you have one that has a big impact--a breakthrough that dwarfs what's been spent on you. So our reward structure has to be different."

In fact, what makes Ellison so happy at Corning has little to do with pay or benefits, and a lot to do with the two senior technicians who help him do his research, and with the new high-purity melting rooms that Corning is building, at a cost of $3 million, so that he can do more experiments.

"I would hate to be competing against me," says Ellison. "At Argonne, I was so desperate for a technician that I offered to pay for one out of my own pocket. Here, not long after I came, I was assigned a second full-time technician--a man with 30 years' experience, who has forgotten more about making glass than I will ever learn. He has tripled my research capability.

"In four years here, I've done eight times the work I did for my PhD thesis. Intellectually, I gallivant the world. Professionally, the quality of science I've done here exceeds that of anything I've done before. The stakes are higher, and I'm much, much more motivated to understand."

Ellison pauses. "I certainly have no want of resources. That, in fact, is the reward."

Miracles of Glass (IV)

One of the glasses that Corning makes--a uv polarizing glass--is so specialized that an entire year's production would fit in a single briefcase. Retail cost? $40 million. Corning made the 200-inch mirror for the Hale Telescope atop Mt. Palomar, the glass for the mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope, and the window glass for every manned American spacecraft from Mercury to the shuttle.

During the early heyday of the railroads, Corning solved a vexing, dangerous problem, which was to design signal-lantern glass that wouldn't shatter, despite being hot on the inside and covered with ice or snow on the outside.

Corning has also had some singular failures, which it keeps close track of. The company developed an extremely fire-resistant glass-polymer material and tried to sell it to the airlines for use as an airplane interior. It suffered from two problems: It was much heavier than what the weight-sensitive airlines were already using, and it was ugly. That product--which is called Corten--remains on the shelf, waiting for a market.

And for years, Corning bet that the best foundation for computer disk drives was a glass ceramic. Corning even built a factory to manufacture glass substrates for computer disk drives. The problem was, they couldn't convince anyone else. In 1995, Corning finally shut down the glass disk-drive business.

THE RIGHT PEOPLE ON THE RIGHT PROJECTS

A manager changed Doug Allan's life--altering not just the arc of his career, but the way he thinks about

himself. "What difference has Lina Echeverría made in my life? All the difference in the world," says Allan, 44, a research associate who has a PhD in theoretical physics from mit. "She helped me grow up. She utterly changed my attitude about what it means to contribute to this lab."

Not that Allan was a novice when he ended up in Echeverría's glass-research group--at least not a scientific novice. He had been at Corning a decade, working one-on-one with a Corning fellow, developing techniques for quantum- mechanical modeling. Basically, Allan was trying to develop equations to predict and explain the behavior of all kinds of materials based on their molecular structure.