When a business is on the brink of crisis, CEOs assemble their war rooms of execs and board members to strategize a way out. But Bloom Energy CEO K.R. Sridhar says leaders may be overlooking one secret weapon in their arsenal: their employees. Sridhar learned this lesson firsthand from former Intel CEO Andy Grove, whose guidance helped pull his company out of a rough patch.
It was 2009, and his energy company was just starting to manufacture. Sridhar tells Fortune that it was hard technology to crack—the engineers had built everything up, but the business hadn’t proven its scalability just yet. At that time, the CEO had never worked in a manufacturing environment, and didn’t know the right path to move forward. Bloom Energy had hit a wall.
