Corning Chairman, President and CEO Wendell Weeks To Be Honored With Yale Legend in Leadership Award
September 2026
Wendell Weeks, Chairman, President, and CEO of Corning Incorporated, will receive the Yale Legend in Leadership Award at the September 2026 Yale CEO Caucus, which will take place in Washington, D.C. on September 15. He was nominated by past award winners and confirmed by Yale faculty members. The award will be presented on their behalf by Apple Executive Chairman and longtime CEO Tim Cook; Motorola Solutions Chair and CEO Greg Brown; Snap-On Chairman and CEO Nick Pinchuk; and National Association of Manufacturers President and CEO Jay Timmons.
Caucus organizer Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Senior Associate Dean for Leadership Studies and Lester Crown Professor in the Practice of Leadership at the Yale School of Management, said:
"Wendell Weeks shows how the old Joseph Schumpeter adage about creative destruction is wrong: innovation does not just come from the creative destruction of old businesses, but that great iconic pillars can be rejuvenated for new eras of competitive challenge and technical innovation.
Indeed, Wendell Weeks practices the rarest form of leadership at the rarest kind of company. He is the steward of an iconic 175-year-old American institution—the firm that supplied the glass for Edison's light bulb, made the glass for the first television tubes, and in 1970 invented the low-loss optical fiber that now carries the world's information—and in his third decade at its helm he has carried it to the very center of the artificial intelligence revolution. Institutions with such iconic legacies seldom reinvent themselves to this extent, and Weeks’ success is a singular story of how to balance innovation with legacy.
"I am especially honored to recognize Wendell Weeks because in an era that rewards the quarterly beat, Wendell Weeks has run Corning for more than two decades on a clock measured in decades—placing scientific bets that take a generation to mature and, no less important, holding his nerve when the market lost its own. That nerve was forged in fire. Weeks rose through Corning's optical fiber business and was named president and chief operating officer in 2002, at the very bottom of the telecom collapse—a cataclysm that took Corning's shares from above $100 to under $2, erased a market value that had peaked above $115 billion, cut sales roughly in half, and cost more than 12,000 jobs. Almost any management would have gutted the laboratories to survive. Corning, with Weeks at the operating helm, did the opposite: it kept its research capability intact and devoted a larger share of a shrinking company to R&D, even as it made every other painful cut. It is that prescient decision and sustained R&D investing which allowed for Corning’s current innovative edge, positioning it at the forefront of the AI revolution.
"The vindication has come in waves. The chemically strengthened glass Corning invented in the 1960s and shelved for want of a customer sat in the archives for four decades—until Steve Jobs called Weeks six months before the iPhone's 2007 launch. It is now Gorilla Glass, the cover on billions of devices. The optical fiber Corning invented in 1970 has become the nervous system of artificial intelligence, and in the past year alone it has drawn a multiyear agreement of up to $6 billion with Meta, a long-term partnership with NVIDIA that will build three new American factories and multiply Corning's optical connectivity capacity tenfold, and a multibillion-dollar agreement with Amazon—propelling the fastest growth of the company's modern era, with optical sales up 32 percent and nine consecutive quarters of expansion. None of it was managed to the next quarter. All of it was built on research, by a chief executive who holds 47 U.S. patents in his own name and can walk the laboratory floor as a peer technical scientist and researcher.
"Weeks has been just as deliberate about where the work is done. Corning still keeps its headquarters in the small upstate New York city that bears its name, as it has since 1868, and under Weeks it has doubled down on American manufacturing: the world's largest smartphone glass line in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, anchored by Apple's $2.5 billion commitment to make every iPhone and Apple Watch cover glass in the United States; new optical cable capacity in Hickory, North Carolina; and thousands of new manufacturing jobs across North Carolina and Texas to feed the AI buildout. He has proven that a company can serve the frontier of technology and the American heartland at once.
"Wendell Weeks is a steward in the truest and most demanding sense: he inherited a great institution, strengthened it, and will hand it on not merely intact but ascendant—positioned not only to prosper in the AI era but to supply the connective tissue on which that era depends. Growth is easy to celebrate. The transformation and renewal of a historic institution is a harder discipline, and a far rarer one.
"For these reasons Wendell Weeks is not merely a deserving recipient of the Yale Legend in Leadership Award. He is a compelling standing rebuttal to the tired claim that American companies can no longer think in decades."
Wendell Weeks has served as chief executive officer of Corning since April 2005 and as chairman since April 2007, and additionally assumed the title of president in October 2025. He has served on the company’s board of directors since December 2000. He joined Corning in 1983 in the finance division and advanced through business development, commercial, and general management roles, becoming vice president and general manager of optical fiber in 1996, president of Corning Optical Communications in 2001, and president and chief operating officer in 2002.
Founded in 1851, Corning today applies its expertise in glass science, ceramic science, and optical physics across optical communications, display, mobile consumer electronics, solar, automotive, and life sciences. Under the growth framework Weeks calls “Springboard,” the company has set out to reach $20 billion in annualized sales by the end of 2026, $30 billion by the end of 2028, and $40 billion by the end of 2030. In the second quarter of 2026, core sales rose 17% year over year to $4.74 billion and core earnings per share rose 30%, led by a 32% increase in optical communications on accelerating generative AI demand.
Weeks holds a bachelor’s degree from Lehigh University and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar. He holds 47 U.S. patents, serves on the board of directors of Amazon.com and as a trustee of the Corning Museum of Glass, and was named to Barron’s 2026 list of top CEOs. He received the Harvard Business School Alumni Achievement Award in 2014 and Korea’s Gold Tower Order of Industrial Service Merit.
Yale Legend in Leadership Award
The Yale Legend in Leadership Award was created 37 years ago to honor current and former CEOs who serve as living legends to inspire chief executives across industries, sectors, and nations. Past recipients include: Reed Hastings, Founder & chairman of Netflix; Bernard Arnault, chairman and CEO of LVMH; Ed Bastian, CEO of Delta, Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA; Tim Cook, executive chairman and former CEO of Apple; Greg Brown, chair and CEO of Motorola Solutions; Glenn Fogel, CEO of Booking Holdings; Larry Fink, chair and CEO of BlackRock; James Quincey, chair and CEO of Coca-Cola; Marc Benioff, chair and CEO of Salesforce; Mike Sievert, CEO of T-Mobile; Ajay Banga, president of the World Bank; Arvind Krishna, chair and CEO of IBM; Steven Spielberg, filmmaker and chair of Amblin Partners; Darius Adamczyk, CEO of Honeywell; Volodymyr Zelenskyy, president of Ukraine; Doug Parker, chairman of American Airlines; Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer; Alex Gorsky, CEO of Johnson & Johnson; Lynn Good, CEO of Duke Energy; Lisa Su, CEO of AMD; Anthony Fauci, director of the NIAID; Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart; Arne Sorenson, CEO of Marriott International; Andrew J. Young, mayor of Atlanta (1982–1990) and ambassador to the United Nations (1977–1979); Brian C. Cornell, chair and CEO of Target Corporation; Ivan G. Seidenberg, chair and CEO of Verizon Communications; Ken Frazier, chair and CEO of Merck & Co.; Colin Powell, four-star U.S. Army general, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989–1993), and secretary of state (2001–2005); Janet Yellen, United States secretary of the treasury; Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever PLC; Mary T. Barra, chairman and CEO of General Motors Company; Brian Moynihan, chairman and CEO of Bank of America; David M. Rubenstein, co-founder and co-executive chairman of the Carlyle Group; Leonard S. Schleifer, president and CEO of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals; George D. Yancopoulos, president and chief scientific officer of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals; Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast; Marillyn Hewson, CEO of Lockheed Martin; Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase; and Ken Chenault, chair and CEO of American Express.
The 2026 Yale CEO Caucus theme is “Ensuring Corporate Visions Match Strategic Realities at 250: Tech Policy, the AI Promise, and U.S. Governance Past the Midterms.”
Yale CEO Caucus partners and sponsors include Gladstone Place Partners, Growth Protocol AI, McKinsey & Company, PepsiCo, Pfizer, Reichman Jorgensen Lehman & Feldberg LLP, and TD Bank Group.
