Creative Tension (Part 3):
In some ways, it was an idyllic professional existence: The work was cerebral and focused on his area of interest, and he was working without interference at the frontiers of math, physics, and materials. "My previous manager was very hands-off," says Allan. "He liked to give me a lot of freedom. What I didn't know was how valuable someone with a hands-on style could be, because I didn't get that experience until Lina got involved in my career."
Allan was transferred to Echeverr?a's group to bring his modeling skills to bear on some of their problems, and also because if his career at Corning was to flourish, he had to get out from behind the shadow of one of Corning's most respected scientists. For a while, working for Echeverr?a wasn't that much different.
Then, one day, she asked Allan to join a team that was attacking a puzzling problem: Semiconductor makers, who were using highly specialized lenses made from Corning glass to etch their chips, discovered that after years of pulsing laser light through the lenses, the glass was changing, shrinking, and affecting performance. "It was my first exposure to working on a team, and to working on something that was being sold as a product," says Allan. "I would certainly say I was frightened."
Quite simply, the team needed Allan to model the glass and the light and to help explain what was happening. "Compared to my previous work," he says, "the modeling was utterly trivial. And yet some of the first calculations I did had more impact on Corning than all my eight years of quantum mechanics. It changed my perspective."
After that success, Echeverr?a asked Allan to do the same kind of modeling on the LCD-glass crash team, of which Adam Ellison was a part. "She said, 'I'm kind of asking, but it's not really voluntary -- it's a huge emergency,' " Allan recalls. "I did think about it for a day. If I said no, it was clear that I would have Lina's displeasure. She made it very clear that she would be grateful if I would do this." Again, Allan joined up, and again, he had a gratifying experience on the project.
Now, five years into working for Echeverr?a, Allan is so much in demand that he often has to palm off requests for his modeling skills to others. More importantly, he's discovered skills beyond his aptitude for equations. "I used to think that math and computational skills were all I brought to the party," says Allan. "My old boss didn't care about my personality at all. What Lina has taught me is that my personality matters a lot. If I do a calculation but can't explain the results to my colleagues, what's the point?"
What Allan discovered is that despite his limited experience with teams, he works well in them and has quickly found an important, diplomatic role to play. "I get along with people, and I don't take offense in professional disagreements," he says. "And not everybody here gets along with everybody else." Allan says, for instance, that Adam Ellison's powerful ability to express his point of view often puts off his colleagues, whether he's right or not.
"I am good at smoothing things over," says Allan. "By getting along, by being friendly, by having conversations with people, I've become far more productive to my colleagues and to the company. I know it sounds trite, but Lina knew things about me, and appreciated things about me, that I didn't know about myself."
For Echeverr?a, Allan's emergence from his professional cocoon ( "He beams now," she says proudly ) is a good illustration of her central tenet of managing creative people. "I feel that if I do one thing right, everything else falls into place: that is, getting the right person on the right project."
In some sense, that's all that managers really have to offer -- the right kind of work. It's the way Echeverr?a taps people's talent, it's the way she develops new skills, it's the way she broadens people's experience. Doling out assignments is the way she makes sure that talent doesn't languish, and that people are attacking Corning's priorities. "Scientists are very driven to deliver," she says. "It's in consonance with the nature of their work." Sometimes they just need a little direction.
"I do ask people to join specific teams and to play specific roles," says Echeverr?a. It isn't just for their own benefit, of course. Corning has work that needs to be done, and fast. The "clock times" in the telecommunications businesses where Corning makes the most money are so short that the company often forms three or four teams to attack technical problems simultaneously from different angles. It can't wait to fail and start again; it needs to fail and succeed at the same time.
"There are times when I don't assign someone to a team not for any technical reason," says Echeverr?a, "but because it wouldn't be the right mix of personalities. Sometimes I have to do a double whammy -- assign the right technical person, and assign someone to handle the human-factors part."
Echeverr?a does not have a Pollyannaish view of management or of human nature. "Sometimes I go ahead and put someone on the team, and I say, 'I cannot sanitize the world for you. I cannot take away this personality you don't work well with. If you do not learn to deal with this person now, you'll encounter this person again later. You have to learn.' "
Inside the glass group, there was more than a little skepticism of Echeverr?a when she took over as manager, especially because she warned that she had a more hands-on approach than the man she succeeded. "They wanted to know, Can you be our leader? Can you inspire us?"
The term "hands-on manager" has, in fact, become synonymous with "micromanager." The difference is a matter of restraint: The best managers must be hands-on, in order to provide guidance, coaching, and judgment about priorities.
Managers are often afraid to ask their employees how they're doing, or how they are feeling, because they aren't sure how to respond if the answer isn't good, or if people reveal a view of themselves that doesn't line up with reality. "People here expect that I will be honest with them," says Echeverr?a. "If you are not honest with them, you are not respecting them. You are just sugarcoating. I think that science-and-technology people are too smart for that."
Recently, she recalls, a member of her group came in very concerned about the level of competitiveness that the person was encountering with the other members of a team the person was on. "And I held up the mirror to that person, because that person was the source of most of those problems. It started out as a very contentious, very difficult conversation. I do see other people's point of view," says Echeverr?a.
Part of Echeverr?a's talent, of course, is her ability to handle such situations. She is a woman not just of energy and humor, but also of thoughtfulness and charm. "I am protective of my group," she says. "They know that, and I gain in their respect for me. I do things that are a little painful for me -- so they are willing to do some things for me that are a little painful for them. What I'm after as a manager is that I want people to feel so good about themselves that they don't need to punch someone else to feel good about themselves."
Charles Fishman ( cnfish@mindspring.com ) is a Fast Company senior editor based in Raleigh, North Carolina. This article was his idea. Contact Lina Echeverr?a by email ( echeverria@corning.com ), or learn more about Corning Inc. on the Web ( www.corning.com ).
Sidebar: Five Steps From Inspiration to Earnings
Charles Deneka, Corning's chief technology officer, can offer all kinds of metaphors for describing Corning's R&D culture. It is, for instance, like the U.S. military, as opposed to the old Soviet military. The Soviet military was all about command and control -- very tightly scripted and managed, and not all that good at adapting to change. The U.S. military is highly trained and conditioned, but it has been given the creative license and latitude to ad-lib in battle.
Corning's R&D operation is like a soccer team, as opposed to a traditional football team: a collection of talent, all with roles to play, all able to keep performing in a game that is constantly changing. It is like a jazz ensemble, as opposed to a symphony.
But as Deneka, 56, acknowledges, in R&D, "there's a range of management, from the intellectual process of coming up with ideas, of creating new thoughts, that is the least managed, up to the running of manufacturing lines of new products, which is as tightly managed as any factory." And Corning has committed to paper the actual steps between inspiration and earnings, and made those steps part of the culture of Sullivan Park. They are quite simple.
An idea or inspiration forms. Before going much further, a team builds up as much preliminary knowledge as possible.
Experimentation tests the feasibility of the idea. Is it borne out in the lab? Is there a reasonable product possible from the idea?
Feasibility is one thing -- practicality is another. At this point, an idea has morphed into a product, and there is a formal team working to overcome manufacturing and marketing hurdles.
Production and profitability are explored. Even if a good idea becomes a good product, can it be manufactured reliably? Can it be produced at a cost that will allow it to earn a profit in the market?
Profitability is examined in light of the product life cycle. Once a product is on the market, how do you stay ahead of competition? This question may take the R&D staff back to Step 1.
The various forms of optical fiber, Corning's largest source of revenue, are at various steps of the process today. Corning's biotechnology initiative -- producing gene chips for medical research -- is in the early stages of Step 4, with products coming out this fall.
There are formal meetings and reviews between each stage, and senior management at Sullivan Park makes decisions about which projects get the money to advance through the steps. And more and more, at each stage of the process, the formal project teams are made up not just of R&D people, but also of manufacturing and business staff members, because Corning is constantly trying to shorten product life cycles. If something new is going to become a business in a year, the business side of Corning needs to know.
Sidebar: What Do Dishes and DNA Have in Common?
Corning may have invented optical fiber, helping lay the cable for the Internet-wired world, but when you mention the company to almost anybody, you'll get, "Corning -- you mean, dishes?"
So what about the dishes, anyway?
If you go to Wal-Mart, you can still buy the classic Corelle, Pyrex, or Corning Ware dishes and casseroles. And they are still designed and manufactured by many of the same folks Corning hired years ago. But Corning doesn't own the business or make the dishes anymore. The company sold the brands in 1998 to privately held Borden, and they are now part of a Borden housewares company called World Kitchen ( www.worldkitchen.com ), which also owns OXO and sells Cuisinart and Farberware, and which claims to be growing the businesses substantially.
At some point, Corning's dishes acquired a frumpy reputation, but their technology was anything but. The clear-glass, heat-resistant Pyrex dishes, first produced in 1915, were part of a glass revolution, and they eventually spawned a vital business for Corning in containers and tools for scientific research. The heat-resistant, glass-ceramic material with the distinctive floral patterns, so renowned for its versatility as both a casserole and a serving dish, also found another use -- believe it or not, for ballistic-missile nose cones. In fact, the molecule models that rest on a coffee table in the sitting area of director of glass and glass-ceramics research Lina Echeverr?a's office are potassium richterite -- a key ingredient to making dishes tough and durable, while also giving them the appearance of bone china.
The consumer-products business was so much a part of Corning's culture that selling it was "emotionally difficult," says Corning chairman and CEO Roger Ackerman. But by 1998, the business accounted for less than 10% of Corning's revenues, and the company was becoming an optical-networking firm focused on high technology. Ackerman was happy to turn dishes over to someone who understood retailing. As part of the sale, Corning required Borden to keep the dishes operations in the greater Corning, New York area, and to sustain Corning's level of employee benefits. "Doing it right was very important," says Ackerman.
And Corning Ware technology continues to pay off for the company that invented it. Corning is moving aggressively into genomics, selling "gene chips" -- glass slides with DNA arrays on them -- for medical-research purposes. Some of the technology for precisely printing 10,000 individual genes on a single glass slide is adapted from the decorating process used to get the floral patterns on the casserole dishes. scribbl?? Uiy@? |
