Wendell Weeks on Risk, Resilience & Reinvention at Corning

0:00Fundamentally, every act of creation is an act of passion. It's not an act of cold logic. Can't crowdsource the next. It's not a framework. Yeah. It is an act of passion. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Leadership Next, the podcast about the people and trends that are shaping the future of business. I'm Diane Brady. And I'm Kristen Stoller. As technology and AI continue to reshape industries, hiring for technical skills remains important, but fostering creativity, curiosity, and empathy are also essential for organizations to remain competitive and resilient. We're here with Jason Gerzatis, the CEO of Deloitte US and the sponsor of this podcast.

0:44Jason, always good to see you. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me, Diane. So Jason, how can organizations balance the development of human skills and technical skills to drive innovation. It is a tech-driven world, but still human skills matter. And I think it comes down to being intentional for leading organizations to still invest and have very directed strategies around building human skills. It's curiosity, imagination, how to team. These are still critical ingredients to creating differentiation and competitive advantage. You know, at Deloitte, we've committed to building those skills and have over time evolved our programming.

1:30Jason, could you say at Deloitte, what role really does apprenticeship play in fostering a culture of continuous learning and development? It's interesting. There was some, I think, time when people thought that apprenticeship and mentorship could maybe be digitized or entirely done remotely. And I think what we've learned is that that's not the case, that apprenticeship and mentorship need to continue to be a formal part of our culture, a part of our learning environment. Absolutely. Well, great insights, Jason. Thank you so much for sharing them with us. Hi, everybody. Welcome to Leadership Next.

2:07I'm Diane Brady. And I'm Kristen Stoller. And in this week's episode, Kristen, we are talking to the CEO of a company that I think is probably one of the most successful companies that a lot of people haven't heard of. Never heard of. I hadn't heard of it. It is the CEO of Corning, who is Wendell Weeks. And Corning, it's interesting because their products are so core to America, but you've never heard of them. Thomas Edison's light bulb. You've got that. You've got the Pyrex. You've got your grandmother's cookware, Corningware. You've got the Gorilla Glass, the screen on your iPhone and your Apple Watch.

2:40And then now you have the next generation fiber optic cables, which are powering the data centers for Gen.AI and companies like Microsoft. And he's also a leader who's held in very high esteem. You know, I know you've done a feature about him and what this now almost 175-year-old company is doing. But Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, a lot of the titans of tech look to this man for leadership for what the next generation is going to look like. And consider him a close friend. I mean, this is the first and only time I've ever gotten a call from Jeff Bezos who was glowing about Wendell. Andy Jassy, Ford's Jim Farley.

3:16Everyone really respects him, and he's on Amazon's board. They looked him for advice, too. Well, and look, this is a podcast about leadership. This is a man who is the child of two alcoholics. He's made very conscious choices for how he wants to lead, his mindset around followership. So I think there's a lot to learn, not just about what's around the corner, but what's within the great leaders we have in our time today. And I really enjoyed it. I hope you will too. All right. So Wendell, it has been almost a little over a year, I believe, since I last went to visit you in Corning. So thank you so much for joining us.

3:53This time in your home. Exactly. Welcome to our home. Yeah. So I was talking to Diane about our time in Corning. And I think one of the things that I loved most about it was all the amazing stories you told, not just of Corning, but of all these partnerships and other CEOs you talked to. Diane actually had a great point yesterday where she said it's amazing that CEOs called me to drop your name instead of the other way around. I've never had Jeff Bezos call me before. That was thanks to you. So I guess the place I want to start is talk to us about these partnerships you have and these relationships you have with CEOs.

4:29Do you have a best story of working with one in a professional context and personally that you think kind of demonstrates the value you bring as a CEO in leadership? That's a lot of pressure. I know. You told me so many. I don't know that I have a—it's been such an important part of my life is all the different folks who've helped make Corning be great and helped me be better. so it's hard to pick out one that's great you've talked to a number of them uh so but let me i'll go back to one that's fun okay we like fun here so a fun one to tell uh is uh would be about steve jobs and uh steve uh when he first wanted to do the iphone and wanted us to invent a more durable transparent material uh he and i met through very funny circumstances you know that story but then subsequent i don't know that story you met through funny circumstances so um yeah we got a mutual friend uh had introduced us electronically and because i wanted to show him an innovation that i'd been working on and what we'd done is we'd come up with a way to make a synthetic green laser, which I won't bore you with how cool that is and why it's cool, but it's cool.

5:54And our idea was that phones had all the processing power, but the displays were really small, and we could do with semiconductor lasers, we could turn each phone into a projector, right? And so that was our idea. And so I shared that data with him, and he came back and said, that's really impressive technical result, but that's the dumbest idea I've ever effing heard in my life. And I was like, the dumbest idea? I feel proud. It's hard. You've had a lot of ideas. It's a badge of honor from Steve Jobs. I mean, wow. He goes, but the good news is you're working on the right problem, which is we need a larger display.

6:38So he then just picked up the phone to call me. and he got put into Corning's general number and the operator answers and he goes, I'm Steve Jobs, put me through to Wendell Weeks and the operator says we would be glad to put you through to Mr. Weeks's office and let you talk to his executive assistant and he goes, I am Steve effing Jobs put me through to Wendell and you've been to Corning, so Corning operator said hello Mr. Jobs I'll be happy to put you through to the executive. So he hangs up, sends this email to my mutual friend and me. So I tried to call Wendell. Typical East Coast bullshit.

7:30They would only put me through to his executive assistant. I pick up the phone and I called Apple's general number and said, please put me through to Steve Jobs. they say if you would fax us a fax fax us the reason for your call and then if it goes to that screen then we'll allow you to talk to his executive executive assistant back to the email you know just try to call steve typical west coast bullshit right to call and he's send me a fax like who uses a fax machine this is copying steve and i like on the whole thing and steve you want want to talk to me, this is my mole number. And that's ultimately, and he called me out of a board meeting, actually.

8:17I took the call. Good thing you took the call, too. And that's how we ended up working together on the iPhone. Well, people don't associate corning with Gorilla Glass on the iPhone. I think it's not something, when you look at an iPhone, you typically think that it's corning. I think that was one of the things I was surprised to You're surprised to learn that it was Corning. Yes, because I associate Corning with Pyrex, with all the old osper. Well, I always think, I do associate you with innovation. I always think, you know, this is what, four millennia we've been making glass. I used to go to the Corning, you know, I used to go to the Corning Museum en route to other destinations.

8:58But I do think you've been on the forefront of innovation. And what is it about what have you done with glass that many others, you know, hundreds, thousands of companies, it's one of those things that could have been commoditized and sent to China. What have you done at Corning that's really sort of put you on the cutting edge to the point where you're seen as much as a tech company as a, you know, commodity company? I think it starts with being deeply passionate about our little slice of the periodic table and our little slice of the electromagnetic spectrum. It's we try to be the world's best at that.

9:42that. And we attract other folks who believe in the same highly passionate way that the wondrous thing this material is, which is it sort of has the structure of a liquid, yet it is a solid at room temperature. And all the magical things that we can do with that is the core of so many of our innovations, whether it is the first low-loss optical fiber, whether it is guerrilla glass, whether it is materials that can go from a rocket, ship all that friction, all that heat into deep space and be fine. This is all these wonderful things that we think we can do with this material to try to make the world just a little bit better with our limited in scope, but deep knowledge.

10:34And so we start there, and then we add to that investment, and then we add to that just fabulous relationships with real innovators to try to understand what we can do to make their stuff better. One of the things that I think is so interesting about Corning is that you have such a decades-long research and development process. R &D is so important to you, you were telling me. And even now with these new fiber optic cables that for Gen AID are making, those were years, decades in the making. correct? So how do you, you know, in a world where there's like such short-term investor pressure, how do you justify investments that may not pay off for decades later and may not pay off at all?

11:16150-year plan. Yeah. That's right. So yes, you're right. We have one of the very oldest research labs in the U.S., over 100 years old. And so many of other research labs have faded, are gone away. Xerox PARC, GE, yeah. And it's, I think it's because we don't, you know, the categorization is everybody says that's a research lab, it's an R &D lab, but actually we're just builders. We don't just research to research. What we're always trying to do is build something that is going to solve a problem, that is going to make things better. And because of that, there's very few divisions between, for instance, my job and a bench scientist.

12:06I mean, I spend as much time with our bench scientist as I would with our customers, as I would with my CFO, as I would. And it is that which is always seeking to build that I think has been our secret to why it always works out for us. in more traditional research labs, which look a little more like academia, have a harder time sort of being relevant in a capitalist world. What would you say was the best bet that you think the company's made in its almost 175-year history? Or your history, the ones you're responsible for. Throughout our history, the best one was the light bulb for Edison. Yeah, I was going to say, of Thomas Edison.

12:51Hard to compete with. Okay, that was a really good idea. Yeah. Light is a good idea. Corning got it right there for sure. So that's one. But there's been so many cathode ray tubes for Sarnoff and RCA to make televisions. The first liquid crystal display substrate that makes all the flat panel displays that you're used to seeing. the first low-loss optical fiber, the ceramic substrates that clean the air of your emissions from your vehicles, the pharmaceutical packaging that made your COVID shot possible. It just keeps going on and on and on. Sometimes it's small things and sometimes it's big things.

13:42The Gorilla Glass, the iPhone's like a huge thing. The Gorilla Glass to make that work, well, you know, it definitely helped. It's a key thing. And sometimes it's smaller still. How do you make a surface that doesn't reflect so that it basically makes it easier to read outside? There's all these different things we try to constantly do. How do we make your display use less power? All these sort of things. And that is the core of what we do. Our why is to do life-changing innovation and help others be successful with it. You know, as we were sitting down, you talked about followership, and I want to get to that, but I'd love to get a sense of what shaped you as a leader.

14:28And one of the things that impressed me when I was reading about your background is just the fact that you actually talk about having two parents that were alcoholic. You know, that's something that's run in my family. And I think about how it shaped me. How did that shape you when you think about just growing up and what it's done to your mindset as a leader? Well, if you have it in your background, you realize that you come from a pretty chaotic background. So if you come from chaos, you can go a couple of ways, right? I was lucky that I was always smart enough to realize that if I wanted to be a better man, I needed to hang out with better people because I'm pretty malleable.

15:14And as a result, that's why I joined Corning. It was when I first met the people from Corning. They were all just such great people. and people that led lives. Sometimes they're small, sometimes they're larger, but their lives were stable. They served their communities. They served their families. They had work they really liked. And Viktor Frankl writes in Man's Search for Meaning that what you should treat a man like is what he could be. If you treat a man as he is, right? Nothing aspirational about that. Right? If you treat a man as he is, right, he'll never improve. If you treat a man as he could be, then he can accomplish great things.

16:05And Corning created that for me. So one of the big reasons I joined Corning was because of my background coming from relatively chaotic roots. And, boy, it's worked for me. Yeah. I'm curious, one, because you've been at Corning for most of your career. Yes, ma 'am. I know you were at, was it PwC before? Briefly, yeah. Briefly, yeah. I'm at Corning, yeah. How do you, one, sustain yourself as a leader? Has there ever been any times you've wanted to quit? And then I'll ask my second part of the question, but what keeps you going? I wouldn't say there's ever a time that I wanted to quit. Whenever I've said that I hate my job, it isn't that I hated my job.

16:50It is I hated the way I did my job that day. These jobs are great jobs, right? They're just hard to do. And if you don't do them well, well, boy, you don't think highly of yourself or the job you did. So it's that. I never really wanted to quit. I've had plenty of challenging times. I've had times when I wondered if I'm the right person. But these jobs are just terrific jobs. I mean, I love going to work, and I always have. When you say if you're the right person, are you talking about the dot-com crash or another time? For sure. That was one. But there's been others. You know, our mission back when I first became president, right post the dot-com crash, I redid our whole strategic framework and said, But our mission is another 150 years of innovation and independence and all the things that you'd have to do to do that.

17:46We studied deeply all sorts of different companies' histories as well as ours. And we realized how rare that is and how different you have to be to do that. Like a great statistic on this would be take a look at the original S &P 500 list, which was like 57, 58. Yeah. Right? So of that original 500, there's 10 % of us left, 50, 53, something like that left. That is just since 1957, which to you seems like a long time. To me, it's like that's my lifetime, right? And think of everything it takes to be one of the 500 most valuable companies on the U.S. exchanges, the most important exchanges in the world.

18:31and everybody, how good you had to be to be one of all the tens, tens, tens, hundreds, thousands of companies to get there. And then you get there and you can't survive as long as a normal human lifetime. We just took another look at the data from 23 years ago when I put this new framework in place. And going forward, half of the S &P 500, half, gone. Well, the speed of disruption is clearly speeding up. And I think about Jim Collins, Mr. Good to Great, but also why the mighty fail. And one of the theories is doing the right thing for too long. What do you think of as the key for kind of staying ahead?

19:18Because a 150-year plan is tough when you're in an AI environment where it's hard for any of us to predict even what comes out of this. What are some of the principles that you think are going to let Corning sustain? I think people take business and take innovation. And they try to make it fit in business school books or in frameworks or what-to-do books. And they forget that fundamentally every act of creation is an act of passion. It's not an act of cold logic. Can't crowdsource the next. Yeah. It is an act of passion. And for passion to activate, you really need two things, right? You need to actually be good enough at a thing, right?

20:19that you understand it deeply enough that you could be passionate about it. Like it's hard to be passionate about a thing that you don't understand deeply, that you haven't dedicated your life to, you haven't dedicated time to. So we've dedicated our time, our efforts, generations of people, sometimes multiple generations in a family as part of courting, with deep passion about what we're good at, our three core technologies. Like that's what we're passionate about. And then the other piece of passion is you need someone to practice it with, right? And that is all about being trustworthy, having deep trust-based relationships with people that are smarter than you on what they're doing.

21:03And so our success through that time is really with those two things. How do we behave in a way that our communities can trust us? Our people totally trust us. Our customers trust us. The individuals there have such relationships. They share with us, like, here's what our problems are. Here's what we're thinking about. Here's where we're struggling. Here's what I'm confidentially dreaming of doing. And then for us to be talented enough at our little tiny thing to help them make their big thing work. What do you think? And I've asked you this before, but I'm curious, again, to ask it to you a year later.

21:40because you've been betting so big on this Gen AI, this next wave that's coming. What do you think is next after this that you're really excited about? Well, first of all, Gen AI is really at the beginning. If you think about it from our slice, it's like we start with photons. So photons for us is what it's about. I know other people think it's about GPUs. I know that. For me, it's about photons. And so that is still at the very beginning. The next really frontier for us in AI is what's called the scale-up piece of the network as fiber replaces copper. Fiber optics, photons replace electrons deeper and deeper in those GPU neural networks.

22:32And so we're in the midst of doing a bunch of inventions there, working with great companies to how do we bring some of our ideas together with theirs to make AI as great as it can be from a networking standpoint. But also, while we're doing that, we're firing up what will be America's largest solar plant for ingots and wafers. And little known, solar, probably 98 % of polysilicon solar, which is the most significant technology in solar, is sourced in China. the fundamental material, the ingots and the wafers, probably 45 % of that is in Xinjiang province. Well, lucky you on the tariff front then.

23:21Yes. So what we believed is we could bring our skills because we use that same material to make semiconductors, right, that we could take that skill and apply it to solar because what we believe deeply is that the U.S. needed its own independent source of all sources of energy. And that has been a journey. And we are just in the midst of starting up that plant. So while AI is going on, we're investing in solar. You mentioned recently the big announcement we had with Apple. So while we're doing AI, we're also investing in the next generation of mobile consumer electronics. We're also trying to bring new innovations to automotive.

24:08The key is when your mission isn't to optimize the share price in any given time period, and instead it's for another 150 years, is in the upswing of the business that's really working well today. What you don't do is you don't pour all of your investment into that. You create the seeds in other areas in a balanced way because all things go through cycles. And what we want to do is make sure that as our big businesses go through cycles, that we have the next innovation for the next generation of people that will follow me to carry on this tradition. So, Gwendolyn, talk about being, you're on the Amazon board, and some CEOs think it's incredibly valuable to be on a board.

24:54Others are like, I'm too busy. Why that board, and just generally, what have you gotten out of being on a board as a CEO? If you get an opportunity to learn from folks like Jeff Bezos or Andy Jassy, say yes. So what have you learned then? Tell me what you've learned. So many things. I'll take one from Jeff Bezos. This is like so important. This is a very true thing of most great entrepreneurs is they view risk differently than you and I do. I have a great Steve story about that too, which is they have a much more even view of risk. Most of us view risk as all the ways that you personally can look like an idiot, right?

25:49Definitely. And it shades the way you look at things. Jeff looks at things very straightforwardly and is damned fearless, right? And then what he believes, and he's taught it to me, and it's true, is that all the value you create isn't in lamenting how you failed here or failing faster, any of this other stuff everybody talks about. It's double down on what works. If something is working, double down on it. And if that works, double down again. And because it is so valuable for something that works, because that's an annuity, a failure is just a capped amount of money. That is what it is. It creates no great value.

26:35So double down on what works. That is clearly one. Relentless customer focus, both him and Andy. It's like next level. Like that is not just a saying. Well, now I got to know. Amazon, they are focused on you as a customer, making your customer experience better. So many things I've learned from these guys. Well, now I got to know the Steve Jobs risk story because that sounds really tempting too. So the Steve Jobs risk story is my board of directors sent me back to tell Steve, yes, we will do. Yes, we can do it because we invented it. But I can't do everything. So you should get a second source.

27:12Because I don't know that I can make it at the scale that you need. And so Steve and I are sitting alone. And he says, no, you're going to do all of it. And I'm going, what I'm telling you is like, I really can't. Like, I know. He goes, no, you can do it. And I go like, hmm, pretty sure that I know more about this than you. Yeah, you know. I took a hand in inventing this product, and I actually know how the major, I know this better than you. And he goes, no, you don't. You can do it. And I go, no, really, I can't. He goes, do you know what your problem is? Like, so think of this. So whenever, so you're sitting there, these two CEOs.

27:57He goes, you know what your problem is? Yes. He's like, oh, God, I can't wait to hear this, right? And I go, well, you know, I don't know. I got a lot, I'm sure. Like, what do you think my biggest problem is? He goes, you're afraid. what an amazing thing to say he said you're just afraid it was like a shocking thing and I don't know that I'm afraid he goes yeah no you're afraid you know who you're afraid of you're afraid I'm going to launch the biggest product in history and I'm not going to be able to do it because you failed and I'm going to eviscerate you now a fair concern I'd say that's what he said now the truth is I will that's true if you fail i will but look what you're doing you are putting your reputation you're worried about you looking bad and you're keeping your people from greatness imagine how they're going to feel the folks that are working at that plant in harrisburg kentucky all your investment, if they're part of this.

29:03So you're putting yourself above them and your company. And I said to them, you're right, I'm afraid, and I'll go fix that. And we went away, and we said yes, and that is a good Steve Jobs story. And now, full circle moment, because Tim Cook made this announcement about$2.5 billion commitment to produce all of the cover glass for the iPhone and Apple Watch at your Corning, Kentucky facility. Tell us about that. And was getting the call from Tim, like getting the call from Steve, or was it a little easier? Tim's a lot nicer. So I think that is just such a terrific story. And it's so spectacular for our people in Kentucky.

29:54That's a plant that's about 70 years old. We started it in the Cold War. related to some products that were valuable during the Cold War. And then what we do is like the way Corning thinks is if we make a commitment to a community and to people, it's our job to come up with new products, new things that those folks can do. And it isn't right for a factory to die and a community to die because of our lack of imagination when the product naturally went through maturation and exited. So we took and when we did photochromics, we invented that. We brought photochromics there and we made like sunglass lenses there.

30:37And then because we knew optics from doing all sorts of telescope optics. And then we said, okay, we had this idea to do liquid crystal display glass. And so we did that there. And then that is the first place we did Gorilla. And so what this enables us to do is we're going to triple the capacity of this. We're going to do a joint innovation center. We're going to put in like three new generations of technology. So this will be the world's leading production site for any of these type of materials. And it'll do 100 % of Apple's iPhone and Apple Watch products. and will do it in a co-innovation manner with one of the greatest innovative companies in the world, an Apple.