NASA advisor turned $65 billion founder says ex-Intel CEO Andy Grove helped him get out of a crisis: ‘That’s a lesson I will take to my grave’

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. Luckily, Sridhar, then in his late 40s, built a powerful team of confidants outside of the company to lean on, which has only grown to a larger circle today. The now-65-year-old is friends with FedEx founder Fred Smith and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, and was close to the late Tata Group leader Ratan Naval Tata, to name a few. And in that time of desperation, Sridhar tapped Grove for help. The CEO’s team splayed out all their three-ring binders with all the necessary information to understand the problem, but the ex-Intel leader wasn’t keen on flipping through the pages. Instead, Grove ordered all the people out of the room, save for Sridhar and Bloom Energy’s board. “My entire team leaves, so I’m sitting on one side, and my board and Andy Grove [are] sitting on the other side. It’s almost like a firing squad,” Sridhar recalled. “Andy keeps asking the question for the third or fourth time, ‘What’s wrong?’” Whichever way Sridhar tried to explain, Grove would simply repeat the question. And after a few go-arounds, the former Intel leader finally dropped a piece of advice that would stick with the energy CEO forever. “After the third time he asked, I don’t answer,” Sridhar recalls. ”And he says, ‘Okay, very simple. You’re extremely bri…