Dr. Mark Steen is the Vice President of Sustainability and Climate Initiatives at Corning Incorporated, where he coordinates sustainability efforts and drives growth related to global climate action. He previously served as the consulting principal for Corning’s Corporate Strategy group, leading diverse projects in digital transformation, advanced analytics, and mergers and acquisitions. Before joining Corning, Steen worked in the financial sector with Citadel Asset Management and Sanford C. Bernstein and was an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company.

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John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian, and I’m so honored to have with us today Mark Steen. He’s the VP of Sustainability and Climate Initiatives at Corning. Welcome, Mark, to the Impact Podcast.

Mark Steen: Thank you very much, John. It is great to be here. I’ll just say, I love what you’re doing. I think this is a terrific medium and a terrific topic for it. So thank you.

John: I appreciate the kind words and the honor’s mine to have you on. It’s Corning’s first time on the show, it’s your first time on the show, so I know it’s going to be a great show for our listeners and viewers. Mark, before we get talking about all the important and impactful work that you and your colleagues are doing at Corning with regards to sustainability and climate initiatives, can you share a little bit about your upbringing? I know you now live in the beautiful Chicago land area, but where’d you grow up and how’d you get on this important journey that you’re on?

Mark: Yeah. Well, thanks for asking. I grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina and lived there for almost all of my childhood. Spent a little time in New York. But mostly did that. Grew up in a very technical science-oriented family and that continued with me. I wound up getting an undergraduate degree in physics and then wound up getting a PhD in physics as well. That science orientation is really what eventually led me back to sustainability. But I’ll say led me back because what I did was after I got out of a physics school, out of PhD school, I wound up going and working for a consulting firm for a few years. It was McKinsey & Company, and I was doing all kinds of business strategy and those kinds of things. That was pretty interesting to me. I wound up working from there on Wall Street for a while doing investments and that taught me the finance side. Then a friend of mine who I had worked with a bunch was working back at Corning and he said, “Why don’t you come back and work at Corning?” I had served them, they were a client of mine previously, and “Why don’t you come work with us? We just need you to do everything work.” I was like, “Yeah, that sounds kind of interesting.” I wound up going to Corning and working for the C-suite. They used to call me swing capacity for the C-suite. They’d just give me whatever job came along and that nobody else had the capacity to do. So I was doing M&A work, I was doing financial hedging work. I was doing strategy work, communications. I did all kinds of stuff. It’s a true story. They said, “Why don’t you come back for a month and help us?” And I did and then it turned to a second month and a third month and then ultimately, I think it was 107 months of doing things that way. I got to know the [crosstalk]

John: A little bit of overtime. [Crosstalk]

Mark: A little bit longer than I expected but it’s a great and a fun company to work for. I was doing this impactful, interesting work and then one day I was lucky enough to be able to work with the C-suite on a pretty regular basis. I was talking to the CEO and he said look, “What do you want to do next here?” I said, “You know, we’re not doing enough with climate change, we’re just not. We need to be doing more work. We have the ability to reduce our impact on climate change.” But really interestingly, and this is a fun and distinctive thing about Corning, and I’m sure we’ll get into talking about more about Corning, but we have this ability to impact the world through our products to improve all kinds of areas of sustainability actually, but especially climate change. So I said, “Look, this is actually an opportunity for us in a way that it isn’t going to be for every company, and we should take that opportunity.” So as you know when you go to the CEO and you say, hey, there’s a problem, guess who gets to fix it? So [crosstalk] I’m very happy to take on that role.

John: No good deed and no good idea goes unpunished.

Mark: That’s right. But of course, very happy to take on the role. So that’s how I got to sustainability. Kind of an interesting path, but certainly not a direct route.

John: Couple of things, first of all, just to call out to our audience how humble you are. You throw in that, oh, you worked at a little consulting firm like McKinsey. This is no derogation to my great friends at Accenture who’ve been on this show, great firm, but let’s be honest, McKinsey is pretty much the Goldman Sachs of the consulting world. They are the top of the top. Been on the show many times, great people, got to work with them many times and boy, your little throwaway comment, oh, I worked at McKinsey, a little consulting firm. You definitely have had quite a journey, Mark. To your point about Corning and climate initiatives, I was just sharing with another chief sustainability officer yesterday. I’ve had a lot of startups and I continue to love to have startups and young innovators on our show because it’s the driving force behind the American dream. But to your point about making a difference, what I keep seeing and hearing over the 17 years of doing this show over and over again are when huge and iconic brands that matter, that are part of our life and ecosystem, and have been for many, many decades, like Corning, make a move in sustainability or climate, the needle truly moves. So, really so cool of you to call out and bring it up to the CEO and for him to then make you the VP of sustainability and climate initiatives, says a lot about you, and says a lot about your CEO and says a lot about Corning as a culture and a brand that it’s good to be introspective and reflective and understand where you’re doing good and where you could do better. It’s really good.

Mark: Absolutely.

John: Now the journey starts. It’s what? 2020 or so? 2020 ish, four or so years ago this happens. Just for our listeners and viewers, just to have a little bit of tee up annual revenue, over $12 billion for Corning, over 57,000 employees in what? Four dozen, five dozen countries around the world or more, you work in. This is a big company with a big history. So where do you start? How do you take that proverbial blank page and decide how to put one foot in front of the other and start this journey at Corning? What was your thought process on that?

Mark: Yeah, it started what I was saying, I was looking at our product portfolio and our skillset and I said look, there’s a lot of opportunity here. I’ll introduce you to our internal and sometimes external framework, which is we talk about our footprint, we talk about our hand print. When we’re talking about footprint, what we’re talking about is what you generally hear. We need to reduce the GHGs from our operations. We want to make sure that we are not using more water than we need to, that we’re being very careful about industrial waste, all of those things. We want to reduce those. By the way, it goes across all of sustainability. I talked about some of the environmental sustainability metrics, but think about gender equity and pay. You think about opportunities for all different folks in the company, so all across there. Those are ways that we are directly impacting sustainability, and that’s our footprint. But the other piece that I was thinking about was what we call hand print. Let me give you an example. We are actually the inventor of optical fiber. Now, optical fiber is what everybody uses for cables, these days for telephones, but more for the internet. Optical fiber powers the internet. Right now, I guarantee you we are talking to each other over optical fiber, and there’s a pretty good chance that it’s Corning optical fiber too. We invented optical fiber and we’re still a huge manufacturer of it. Now, what can you do with that and sustainability? Well, as you know, in the United States, but also all around the world, there are many people who don’t have the same access to the wonders of the internet, the information that it provides in rural areas, in impoverished areas, underprivileged areas, et cetera. We started to think about how can we improve the connectivity outside of the first areas that get connected. We think about how do we make those connections cheaper? How do we make them faster? How do we make them require less skill? All of those kinds of things. That’s a way that we can impact sustainability with our product set that helps improve the world we’re in and helps enable our customers and our partners to be more sustainable in their operations. We got a lot of these examples. I’m sure we’ll wind up talking about some more of them.

John: I just want to go back and unpack this because I never, ever, and I love it because what makes the beauty of this show is I get to learn, the listeners and viewers get to learn. Footprint I get. Footprint was more of your scope, 1, 2, 3, DEI, ESG, all that kind of stuff. Hand print, where did you come up with that? Was that a self-created term or something that you’ve picked up in other business applications? Never heard it before, but I love it. I want you to explain the derivation a little bit, and I want you to explain a little bit more about the application as opposed to the separation of DIE, ESG, scope one, two, and three at footprint and the evolution of hand print.

Mark: Yeah. The way we think about it is footprint being our direct impact. We’re doing, what it directly impacts.

John: Got it.

Mark: So when we do something with our employees, that’s us directly, when we’re putting GHGs into the air, that’s us directly. Right?

John: Got it.

Mark: That’s footprint. Now, hand print is what we’re enabling in the world. So it might not be us that’s doing it per se. In the example I gave, we’re not connecting up folks in rural areas, but we’re enabling that. I’ll give you another example. For instance, we are the largest manufacturer of polysilicon in the United States. Now, polysilicon is the key ingredient in making both semiconductor chips, but also solar panels, the most common kinds of solar panels. When we expanded our plant recently to be able to make more solar polysilicon, what we’re doing is we’re enabling more solar, especially in the United States. That is another hand print effect. We’re not the ones doing it per se, but we’re enabling customers to have this great impact. Now, as far as the derivation of the term, I know that I didn’t make it up, but I know I read it somewhere, but I don’t really remember where [crosstalk] I read it. But whoever came up with it, I think is brilliant because I think it resonates really well with folks.

John: Hand print can mean also basically your facilitation and enabling of others to just continue to do great work and thrive.

Mark: Sure. Yes. No matter what, but especially sustainability work. I’ll give you another example.

John: Go on. Yeah.

Mark: We actually invented the technology that allows people to make ceramic, what are called catalytic converter substrates. Back in the 1970s, US Congress passed the Clean Air Act, and in fact, I’ll just tell you the story a little bit. We were talking to some of the big three automakers back then, and we thought we had a great glass for their windshields. They said, “You know what? We get what you’re trying to do, but no, that’s a bad idea. But we have this problem. Congress just passed a law that requires a reduction in our carbon monoxide emissions. We know how to do it chemically, but we don’t know how to efficiently pass our exhaust past these chemicals that will create the reaction that’ll scrub the air. We don’t know how to do that.” We said, “Well, we’re pretty good at ceramics. Let us take a crack at it.” We invented both the material and the process that allows you to make a catalytic converter substrate. Now, that business is now over 50 years old. We’ve made catalytic converter substrates, we make diesel filters, we make gasoline particulate filters. All of these are ways that we are making a product that allows our customers and our partners to do something really positive for sustainability in this case keeps [crosstalk] millions of tons of carbon monoxide out of the air.

John: That’s so exciting. Talk a little bit about the journey. You start this journey. You got the footprint, you got the hand print, and you’re going down both paths. If we’re going to talk about concurrent paths that is continuing to help Corning evolve their overall climate initiatives and sustainability initiatives, talk about how’s it going? What’s working, what are you excited about? What have you seen? What’s a week look like for you? What’s a month? What’s a quarter look like for you in terms of how do you decide where to spend your time? Because you’ve picked such a, and I don’t mean this facetiously at all, but such a noble and important topic at the right time where we desperately need to roll back the harms that have been done historically around the world. How do you choose to continually toggle and balance your time and focus?

Mark: Yeah. It’s tough, first of all.

John: Yeah.

Mark: Look, let’s not kid each other. If you’re really asking, there’s a lot of emails, there’s a lot of meetings. It’s looks like a lot of people’s workday but at a slightly more abstract level, right?

John: Right.

Mark: I would say there’s three pieces. This is actually how I organize our strategy and the way we look forward, there’s three pieces that all fit together and build on each other. The first one is compliance. As you’re well aware, as many people are talking about, there are new regulations coming into place, especially in Europe. Global companies all have to be thoughtful about compliance and across sustainability, so compliance is great. That’s a must have and a right to play. The next one is the footprint. Where I think about okay, great, we’ve done what we have to do. What do we do that shows that we actually mean this stuff. That’s really what footprint is. It’s like, hey, we have some responsibility here. Let’s be adults about it.

John: Makes sense.

Mark: We got to do stuff. The next piece is that I work on what are our footprint goals? How are we making progress towards them? Are we prioritizing things the right way? How do we get prioritized within the company’s other priorities? Because they’re all finite resources and there are some great wins out there where we do some energy reduction work. This is not my work, and so I get to claim pride for this. We’ve won the Department of Energy Star Partner of the Year award for 11 years in a row.

John: Wow.

Mark: I know there are only 10 companies in the US that have won it for 10 years in a row. I don’t know how many have won it for 11 years in a row.

John: Congrats. [Crosstalk]

Mark: So we work all the time to get more energy efficient and improve our footprint. Now, if you can get that stuff right, if you can show, hey, we’re serious about this, we care about it, we are looking at ourselves. We’re being adults about this, then you can look at the hand print stuff, and so the hand print stuff winds up being driven by customers. We are a mentioned in passing a bunch of innovations that we’ve had over the years. But the truth is, we think of ourselves as a material science innovation company. That’s what we do. That’s what is our core. That’s what ties together all these products I’ve been talking about. When we go out and we talk to customers, we start saying, hey what are your sustainability goals? What are you trying to do? What are the opportunities that you see in the world? How can we help enable that? What are the innovations that are going to help create those products you want to make? And there’s a bunch of them.

John: That’s so interesting. Let’s go back. This is so fascinating, the 1, 2, 3 approach on how you look at your professional time and resources at Corning. Compliance, as you say, right to play. Talk a little bit about you sit in a very important role at a very big brand with huge visibility around the world. As you said, the EU is leading on the regulatory matters on these things, but not far behind is Gary Gensler in the United States and other parts of the world are starting to also wake up and also catch up. How do you as you say, do the right thing for the right to play with regards to regulatory and compliance issues, but also exercise your voice? Because what I keep being told over and over again is how not to let the patchwork quilt version of the regulatory system that exists today because it’s so new drive you nuts and become form over function with regards to reporting. How do you help influence in the future, Mark, that there should be some harmonization on regulations across the world to make it, not to say a less of a hurdle for great companies like Corning and other great iconic brands around the world to do their business, but to also reduce all the noise and the cross hairs that exist when regulations really become disparate and sometimes become counterproductive to the work that they’re actually trying to regulate?

Mark: Yeah. It’s easy to get into the mode of all the problems of regulations, but let me find the positive in it. [Crosstalk]

John: Yeah, let’s go for positive.

Mark: It’s a lot of work. Let’s not kid each other. It’s a ton of work, takes a lot of time, all that stuff and it’s a challenge. I don’t think anybody thinks all the regulations are quite right yet. Like I said, we’re an innovation company. When you’re doing innovation things don’t go right every time the first time.

John: Correct.

Mark: But let’s go with the positive. A lot of the work that is being done in these regulations is it’s work around how do we first of all have some transparency? Of course, when you’re working with, for-profit companies that are competing against each other, you have to find the right level of transparency. That’s a challenge but the point is that we’re trying to have some transparency. We’re trying to make sure that the consumers and the public and all of these different publics are getting the thing that they think they’re getting, right?

John: Right.

Mark: They want to know, hey, you didn’t get this by using child labor or putting GHGs in the air, whatever it is. Okay, that is a fair obligation that we have to those stakeholders. I’m in. So transparency at the right level. That’s it. That’s okay, I’m good with that. Then another thing that they’re really getting at, and I’ll be candid, this can be a real advantage, is process. We have a lot of really tight, well worn, well practice processes around financial data. We know how to audit it, we know how to define it. We do not have that same level of rigor around a lot of the non-financial data that winds up being the metrics and the milestones and the ways that we measure progress around sustainability. Now, I mentioned I’m a physics guy by training. I like the numbers, I like the analysis, but your analysis and your conclusions are only as good as the data that you get in. I guarantee you, if you talk to any sustainability professional about the data that they’re getting in about their, what we call footprint about what impact they’re having in their own operations, nobody is thrilled with the quality of that data. Now, look, some data is probably better than no data, but the idea of making the quality of that data better, the processes that produce the data, the auditability of the data, that’s also not an all a bad thing. I’m not trying to put lipstick on a pig.

John: No.

Mark: There are a lot of challenges, but I do see some upside from these regulations too. I think it will help us mature as a discipline.

John: Yeah. As you say, they’re innovating themselves. Like you said, let’s cut the regulators a break. This is all new. This is all new for everyone. It’s new for Gensler and the SEC, it’s new for the EU. It’s not like we’re dealing with 100 year old rules and regulations that are just being updated. This is a new process. So I agree with you, and I think it’s important to cut everybody a little slack in this process and things of that such. Are you hopeful that as things evolve and things get more mature, there will be some level of harmonization which is productive to the process?

Mark: I think so. I can go into details, but really you look at things like TCFD, which has been a very successful framework and created or led in creation by Michael Bloomberg. Certainly, this is a guy who understands business and is sympathetic to making a profit in the world. TCFD very successful, but now TCFD has been ended and it’s become part of the ISSB process, which is the international sustainability process. That’s a form of harmonization. To their credit, let’s take the TCFD board and they say, you know what? We were here to establish something, to create something. We’ve done that. Let’s step back and let’s put this under the umbrella of an organization, which has more purview around accountability standards and reporting and that sort of thing. That’s a great way to harmonize. I think that will continue to happen. Everybody’s going to have their own little flavor, and there’s going to be things that are annoying. But then companies are going to say, hey, look, are you really getting anything out of this little tweak in language here or there, whatever? Let’s cut it out. It’ll be a lot cheaper for us, and candidly, it’ll make things more comparable, which is what we all want anyway. I think it will harmonize, but it’ll be painful. Come on. We know there’ll be ups and downs.

John: For our listeners and viewers who’ve just joined us, we’ve got Mark Steen with us today. He’s the VP of Sustainability and Climate Initiatives at Corning. To fine Mark and all his colleagues and all the important and impactful work they’re doing in sustainability and climate, please go to www.corning.com. Mark, four years in or so, obviously a lot’s working. You shared a lot. You got the compliance stuff going. You have the right to play. You’re working on your footprint and the hand print. What keeps you up at night? What’s some of the biggest challenges you’ve found during these last four years for you to manage through and navigate?

Mark: Yeah. Obviously, it’s on my mind. Look, there’re the challenges of the internal workings. As I mentioned before, there’s always competing priorities and folks got to figure out, okay, what is it that we’re really trying to get done here? There’s an educational aspect to it where people don’t always realize, oh, no, this is what that really means. Ah, yeah. Okay, that makes sense. You have to remind people about the fact that, you know what, when we are doing something new, we invest in it, and then it pays off, but it doesn’t always pay off the first day. There’s all those challenges, but I’ll tell you, John, the biggest one in my mind is a macroeconomic one. Which is that I am utterly convinced, and this is true of all of sustainability, but I’m going to focus on climate for the moment. I’m utterly convinced that the economic system of the world will recognize over time that climate change is an externality to all the companies. It’s something we all aren’t paying for, but we’re going to wind up paying for it over time as climate continues to change and things continue to change. Somehow we’re going to have to fold that economics into our system. Somehow it’s going to have to happen. What that translates to for me, at a Corning level is at some point, someone’s going to be paying for this. I always wonder, okay, are my customers going to pay for this? Am I going to have to find efficiencies in my operations to pay for this? How are we going to change the way that we do business that allows us to become more sustainable and make that transition to a more sustainable economy? Now, you may have noticed, I can be an optimistic guy. So let me give you the hopeful part of that. I do believe that over time, what we move to is a more efficient world that is cheaper, better, and less negatively impactful on the world. I’ll just give you the example that I give all the time. If you had gone back to the 1870s, and you had said, hey, we just found this stuff called oil. It’s really great, great fuel. I got a good idea, let’s go across the earth. We’ll go to a desert and dig a really deep hole and then we’re going to take what comes out. We’re going to put it in ship. Ship it across the world, do a bunch of chemical stuff to it, put it in trucks, ship it across the entire country, and put it on the corner of every city in the United States. That’s how we’re going to fuel people getting around. That’s a stupid idea, but over time, it became the more efficient, the more economical way to do things. I think what we’re going to find is you know what? We can improve on that. There’s a lot of questionable things going on in that system I just described, and we can improve on it. We can find sources of power closer to where they are used. We can find more efficient ways to transform the energy that comes from the sun, which is ultimately where most of our energy comes from, into the energy that powers the things we do. I think we’ll find efficiencies over time, but how we get there and who pays for it in the meantime, that’s one of the things that keeps me up at night.

John: If you were to say specialty or sweet spot of sustainability for Corning, what would be the first sentence or words that come to mind if I say what are you just killing? What are you guys so good at, you’re just slaying it and you have repetitive and consistent behavioral expertise at?

Mark: Yeah. It’s innovation. Look, we know material science innovation better than anyone in the world, I would argue. We are a manufacturing company that spends a billion dollars a year on R&D and employs over a thousand PhD scientists.

John: Wow.

Mark: Just think about that. So we are dedicated to innovation. I don’t think we mentioned this yet, but we’re 175, almost 173-year-old company. We provided the first glass envelope for the light bulbs that Edison made. We still, by the way, have that order with Thomas Alva Edison’s signature at the bottom.

John: No.

Mark: We’ve been around a long time and we’ve been innovating material science for a long time. When you step back and you look and you say, okay, what do we need to make sustainability work in the world? The answer is there are a lot of things, but one of the things is we’re going to need ways to do chemical and physical processes that are different, and that’s going to require new materials and new types of materials. I’ll give you another example. By the way, we get to use this expertise and, and build on it. Here’s an example of how we build on our expertise. I mentioned the catalytic converter substrates, right?

John: Yes.

Mark: The exhaust goes through, it takes out. Now, think about direct air capture for a minute. For those who aren’t familiar, direct air capture is where you go out into somewhere anywhere in the world, and you start putting a bunch of atmospheric air through a big filter, basically, that captures the carbon dioxide directly. Then you take the carbon dioxide out of the filter, you clean the filter, and you put it underground or somewhere like that. Now, what we’re doing with our catalytic converters is we’re taking exhaust, and we’re taking carbon monoxide out of that and doing a chemical reaction with that. In fact, the ceramic substrates that we have may be exactly the right solution for doing the same thing with direct air capture. So we’re working with a number of direct air capture companies to modify slightly our catalytic converter substrates and use them in these huge direct air capture machines. That’s a way that we look at what we have, our product set, but also our expertise. I won’t go into the technical stuff that makes all this stuff possible, but also our expertise and turn it into an innovation that allows us to address climate change.

John: It’s fair to say that Corning not only is an amazing 173-year-old innovation material science company, but it’s also considered an OEM. Is that not correct?

Mark: Yeah.

John: To a degree.

Mark: Sometimes we’re a tier two or something like that, but yeah that’s [crosstalk]

John: Okay, but using my experience in the industry that I’m in and tying it back to sustainability, the OEMs that I get to deal with are mostly on the electronic side the Samsung’s, the LGs, the Dells and all those great HPs of the world. One of the trends that I’ve seen, I want to understand if this trend is going on at Corning. I assume it is, but I want to hear your thoughts and take on it. Is obviously it’s buried within your sustainability practice, and let’s just us call it your footprint practice, is also managing the trend of the linear to circular economy.

Mark: Yeah.

John: Within that, most of the OEMs we’ve been dealing with their engineers, or your version of PhDs they were never thinking so much 20, 25 years ago about the circular economy as they are today. Therefore, what we’ve seen crop up the last, let’s just say, probably outside 10 years, but even closer, five to seven years, is the design for circularity or design to sustainability divisions now of each of the R&D or innovation centers of these OEMs to take a lot of, not only as you pointed out five minutes ago, all the new stuff that you’re working on and the new innovations and new things you could do to keep your company relevant and moving forward after 173 years of success, but also taking a lot of the old materials and repurposing them back into new items. How does that work at Corning?

Mark: Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s a great question too because Corning is, we call ourselves a glass and ceramics company, right?

John: Right.

Mark: So we’re famous for glass. Glass is what they call infinitely recyclable. What that means is a lot of, for instance, plastics, you can recycle them, but there’s some degradation every time you do.

John: Sure.

Mark: There’s no degradation with glass. So it’s a really terrific substance to put into the circular economy. Now, here’s the challenge that we face. By the way, we absolutely hear that from our customers is how can we get more recycled material, more reuse material? There’s a couple of ways that we do this. First of all, we do use what’s called internal cullet which is not recycled material, but it’s basically the waste glass. For instance, in the manufacturing process, you have to trim off the edges and stuff like that. We can use all of that and put it back into the front of the process and remelt that right away. What that means is that we’re not putting into the landfill any of the glass that we produce from our factories, which is a great first step. But then the next step is, okay, so how do we get glass back after it’s been used? So post-consumer glass and use that again. It’s a tricky problem and the reason it’s a tricky problem is because our glass is so highly engineered that parts per billion of contaminants can change the material properties of our glass. But we are looking at ways that we can take certain streams of glass, do enough cleaning and enough characterization so that we really understand what’s in that glass, and then turn it back to the front. That’s going to take a little while for us to do. But like I said, we’re an innovation company and at 173 years you know that we’re a patient innovation company. So it may [crosstalk] us a little while, but we’ll get there.

John: With 1,000 PhDs or so on the payroll. My money’s [crosstalk] You’ll come up with it.

Mark: We’ll get there.

John: You’ll get there.

Mark: Yeah.

John: You and I can flip on our TVs today and whether we’re watching Bloomberg or whether we’re watching any of the other great networks or things of that such, actually, by the time we turn off the TV, we’ve heard the terminology AI at least once. Talk a little bit about AI and your sustainability journey with your colleagues at Corning and what the applications of AI are to continue to help drive your goals, your team’s goals of not only great sustainable practices, but also the climate initiatives that you’re trying to tackle.

Mark: Yeah. I’m going to talk about AI in two different ways that have really different impacts on us, both positive, but things that people don’t necessarily think about it. On the one side, when you think about AI, there’s really an ability of AI to, what I’ll call explore spaces in ways that humans can’t. Look all throughout, for instance, a set of chemical compositions. Well, this is one of the things we do. We invent glass compositions, and so we can use AI in our discovery process in a way that really accelerates what we’re doing. Have you ever heard of the term centaur chess? Is that something that’s familiar to you?

John: No, but I want to learn.

Mark: Alright. This is an idea that was especially popular a couple of years ago. They had these man versus machine AI chess games, go games, whatever it is.

John: Oh yeah, of course.

Mark: There’s actually leagues for this now, it’s pretty cool. What people figured out is some of the best ways that you can play chess is as a team, the man and the machine, or the person and the machine, the AI working together teaching each other. Well, this is what I would do. Well, this is what I would do and then learning from each other. So you get to solutions that are more creative than the machine has the experience to know about. The human brain still has the better creativity, but then has the more comprehensive knowledge and the unique insights that the machine has. So they call that centaur chess because it’s human horse hybrid centaur, and so they call it centaur chess. Well, we talk about that internally around our discovery. How do we pair up these creative knowledgeable scientists with AI to get an even better impact out of that? That’s one piece. It’s the centaur material discovery piece. But let me give you a different piece that you probably weren’t thinking about. As you know, all of these ai applications require a lot of compute power and that compute power is in these hyperscale data centers. Well, hyperscale data centers need connections between them, and we make optical fiber. Now, the more the optical fiber is an extremely low power way relative to copper, to transmit signals from one to the other. So already the world’s long distance networks are all optical networks. We’re starting to see connections between data centers, these really, really high bandwidth connections go to specific solutions that we’ve created to make those connections between data centers. Within the data center, they call it the top of the rack. So you have switches at the top of the compute rack. Within these top of the rack solutions between the switches, you’re seeing optical and then we’re watching it go closer and closer to the actual GPUs and CPU, the computing units all the way down to the board. This AI trend, we’re using it internally, but it’s also a great opportunity for newly engineered Corning solutions that’s actually driven pretty good growth for us. So we’re very excited about the trend from both perspectives.

John: Wow. I love it. I assume, Mark, but I don’t want to assume anything. Is it an annual reporting on all the great work you and your colleagues are doing in sustainability and climate initiatives?

Mark: Yes, we do. We’ve put out our annual sustainability report, and I should mention, we put out actually a separate report on DE&I. We try and highlight the work we’re doing there and what work we’re doing both with our workforce and our communities, et cetera. We put those out in about February of each year. It’s something we’re proud to highlight and frankly, our investors and our shareholders really like to see and our stakeholders [crosstalk]

John: Yeah, and they live in perpetuity on corning.com.

Mark: They do indeed.

John: Perfect. Look, talk about the average consumer. Talk a little bit about the sustainability work that you’re doing, that the average consumer who’s listening today to this show or watching it can say, ah, that’s right. So that’s how Corning’s benefiting me. Well, obviously there’s lots of B2B initiatives that are unbelievably beneficial. One was the AI one you were talking about in terms of hyper connecting these very high-powered data centers. But let’s go back to average consumer on the street. How is the average consumer being greatly impacted and positively impacted by all the important and great work you and your colleagues are doing at Corning?

Mark: Yeah, thanks. One of the fun things about Corning is that even though we are a global company, we’ve been around for a long time, most of the average consumer on the street, if they were born before or about, I don’t know, 1970, 1975, something like that, when they think of Corning, they think of dishware because we [crosstalk]

John: [Inaudible] I’m born in ’62, so that’s what I grew up with in my house.

Mark: Absolutely. They had the little blue flower on them.

John: Oh, yeah.

Mark: Now, let me tell you, by the way, I wasn’t aware, you might not be aware of why that was such an impactful product. The reason is because it is a ceramic piece of material that does not expand and contract with heat. So you say, okay, well, I guess that’s interesting, but what does that do for me? Right?

John Right.

Mark: Well, back in the ’50s, there were people who were freezing their dinners. They’d make their lasagna, they make whatever they do, they put it in their casserole dish, and then you freeze it. What you want to be able to do is take it out of the freezer and bake it. Well, if you take this Corning, it’s a form of ceramic. You put it in the [crosstalk]

John: Oven.

Mark: Oven, you heat it up. It doesn’t expand. If you use regular ceramic, expands and cracks and all the dish breaks, right?

John: Right.

Mark: But with the Corning ceramic that we used back then, it wouldn’t break. So that’s why people got excited about it. Now, what else does that do? That same form of material is used in Pyrex, which is one of our brands. Pyrex, if you’ve ever taken a chemistry course, you’ve been in any research laboratory throughout the world, there is a very, very good chance that you’ve seen some Pyrex somewhere. Why? Because you can do the same thing. You can take the glass bottle, put it over the buns and burner or whatever heat source you have, you can heat it up. It’s not going to break. These are the kinds of things that people knew about Corning 34 years ago. What’s interesting is that you’ve probably used, I don’t know, four to six Corning products today without having any idea. I’ll give you a couple. I should say Corning products or products that Corning enabled. So one of them, I already mentioned catalytic converters. If you had a car that’s not an EV, then you probably used a catalytic converter. If you do have an EV there’s a chance that our glass is on that beautiful display panel that you have in the front. So we’re seeing more and more companies who say, hey, I need lighter weight in my vehicle, in my EV. So we can provide a glass that is a much lighter weight and a much lower GHG intensity glass. We can talk more about that, and then I mentioned optical fiber. So we’re definitely talking to each other right now over optical fiber, like I said, probably Corning optic, but you’re also looking at me through a screen, and that screen is going to be an LCD screen. The glass that makes that screen possible is Corning glass. We make extraordinarily high tech glass that you can print semiconductors right on top. That’s what enables these large screens. By the way, we make this glass, just to give you a sense of how this works and the high thickness of the glass. We make this glass in sheets that are larger than two king size beds put together. They’re only a few pieces of paper thick. The flatness, the waviness on top of that is just a couple of atoms difference from one place to another. That’s a product that you’re using in your display. If you got a vaccine recently, or you’re going to get a flu vaccine in the fall or whatever, there’s a good chance that that comes in Corning glass. If you used any semiconductors, the semiconductor was probably made, if it’s an advanced semiconductor using a lens that Corning creates with very, very high purity fused silica, which is the only way that you can make lenses for these single nanometer wave line with semiconductors. So you’re using our products all the time, you just don’t know it.

John: How about our cell phones and our tablets? Same thing.

Mark: Absolutely. So the front of your cell phone or your tablet is very likely to be a highly protective glass called gorilla glass that we invented a little over a decade ago. There you go. That’s it. We’re there. [Crosstalk] You’re using our products all the time. [Crosstalk]

John: We’re using your products all the time. We’re not only using it in the kitchen for our lasagna, but oh my gosh, we’re using it on our tablets and our cell phones. You guys touch all of our lives in so many ways. It’s amazing. Now, Mark, what’s ahead you got four years or so behind you as the VP of sustainability and climate initiatives. You are young, you’re in a great brand, you’re in an important position, and you’re making great progress. What gets you excited and most excited and gets you out of bed? You’re thinking now about we’re headed into the end part of ’24, ’25, ’26 are upon us. What are you thinking about? What’s on your mind and what’s some of the great challenges and opportunities that you want to tackle in the coming 24 months?

Mark: Yeah, look, I want to see our hand print really expand. I want to find out where customers who are thinking, especially the ones that are thinking about sustainability challenges. We also make sciences products. I mentioned Pyrex. We are a part of the stack that makes rabies vaccines in India. We’ve got a new collaborative there with a local women’s group to educate people about rabies these vaccinations. I want to see our sustainability enabling products growing. I want to see our solar take off. I mentioned direct air capture. We have some energy storage technologies that are in very early stages. I want to see those grow and develop and take off. I want to figure out how we can take our customers and even more so our potential customers out there and let them realize, hey, I’ve got a great idea to make the world more sustainable, but I need this solution that I don’t know how to get. Maybe Corning are the right folks to help us with that. For me, what that does is it drives an impact way larger than we can have, even if we took our entire footprint to zero. There’s only so much you can do once you get to zero, the positive impact you can have from a hand print like that is many times larger. So I want to see that piece developing and really impacting the world in big ways. So making those connections with customers, potential customers, figuring out how to innovate in new ways, that’s what really gets me going and excited.

John: Now I see the method to your madness style, Mark. You really don’t get to do hand print work and expand your hand print until you get the compliance and the footprint stuff right?

Mark: You got it exactly. That’s why I list them in that order. You got it.

John: I love it.

Mark: That’s it.

John: Now I got it. I finally caught up. I love it. Mark, listen, as you and I know, sustainability has no finish line. It’s a journey. I want you to know you are always welcome back on the Impact Podcast to continue to share the very important and impactful journey that you’re on in sustainability and climate initiatives at Corning with your colleagues. I just want to thank you again for all the important work that you’re doing at Corning and Corning for their great work. just again, thanks for your time today. I’m super grateful for you taking an hour to visit with our listeners and our viewers, and share this really different journey that we’ve never heard before. It’s really important to give you a voice to be able to inspire the next generation of Mark Steens who are going to continue to change the world behind us. Again, thanks for your time today. More importantly, Mark, thank you and your colleagues at Corning for not only making the world a more sustainable place, but a better one as well.

Mark: Well, thank you, John. This was a lot of fun. Be happy to do it again sometime and you’re doing this work of getting the word out, so thanks to you.

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