When a enterprise is on the point of disaster, CEOs assemble their battle rooms of execs and board members to strategize a method out. However Bloom Power CEO Ok.R. Sridhar says leaders could also be overlooking one secret weapon of their arsenal: their staff. Sridhar discovered this lesson firsthand from former Intel CEO Andy Grove, whose steering helped pull his firm out of a tough patch.
It was 2009, and his power firm was simply beginning to manufacture. Sridhar tells Fortune that it was laborious know-how to crack—the engineers had constructed every part up, however the enterprise hadn’t confirmed its scalability simply but. At the moment, the CEO had by no means labored in a producing setting, and didn’t know the correct path to maneuver ahead. Bloom Power had hit a wall.
Fortunately, Sridhar, then in his late 40s, constructed a robust group of confidants outdoors of the corporate to lean on, which has solely grown to a bigger circle at this time. The now-65-year-old is pals with FedEx founder Fred Smith and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, and was near the late Tata Group chief Ratan Naval Tata, to call just a few. And in that point of desperation, Sridhar tapped Grove for assist. The CEO’s group splayed out all their three-ring binders with all the required info to know the issue, however the ex-Intel chief wasn’t eager on flipping by means of the pages. As an alternative, Grove ordered all of the individuals out of the room, save for Sridhar and Bloom Power’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 method Sridhar tried to clarify, Grove would merely repeat the query. And after just a few go-arounds, the previous Intel chief lastly dropped a chunk of recommendation that will keep on with the power CEO ceaselessly.
“After the third time he asked, I don’t answer,” Sridhar remembers. ”And he says, ‘Okay, very simple. You’re extraordinarily vibrant, you’re extraordinarily good. You’re going to determine this out. You don’t want me coming right here and taking a look at these three-ring binders to determine what’s fallacious.’”
“‘The reason why you’re failing here and not in your technology, [is because] you’ve not walked around the floor and asked the people what is going on.’”
Grove informed him that one of the simplest ways to get to the basis of the issue is to go to the staffers constructing his enterprise. They’ve a first-hand account of what works inside the firm, in addition to what might go sideways—and it’s a lesson he’s lived by within the 17 years since main the corporate from a pre-IPO cleantech startup, to the $65 billion power enterprise it’s at this time.
“‘They know something’s wrong, as they’re building for you,’” Sridhar remembers Grove telling him. ”’Go to the ground and have interaction with the individuals, and study from them what’s not working for them.’”
“That’s a lesson I will take to my grave.”
From senior NASA advisor, to the CEO of a $65 billion power firm
Sridhar might have spent greater than 20 years shaking up the power trade, however his profession first blossomed in academia. He grew to become impressed to review engineering as a younger teen after witnessing the aftershock of the 1970’s oil embargo the place Arab nations of OPEC (OAPEC) diminished manufacturing and banned exports to the U.S. and its allies—which included his residence nation of India. Sridhar says he grew to become decided to curb oil dependency from one single state.
The CEO first launched his profession by means of greater schooling, receiving a bachelor’s diploma in mechanical engineering at NIT Trichy within the area of Tamil Nadu. He then went on to earn an M.S. in nuclear engineering, and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, each on the College of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. From there, he went on to share his experience with budding STEM professionals when he grew to become a professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering on the College of Arizona.
Throughout his tenure as a professor from 1990 to 1999, he directed the varsity’s Area Applied sciences Laboratory (STL), the place he first started rubbing shoulders with NASA officers. Sridhar grew to become a senior advisor to the NASA administrator, aiding the U.S. house company in researching know-how that would convert Mars’ atmospheric gases into oxygen for propulsion and life help. Beneath his management, STL gained a number of aggressive contracts to conduct analysis and growth for the exploration of and flight experiments to Mars.
In 2001, Sridhar shifted his focus from Mars to Earth, cofounding Ion America: an power platform firm with a mission to make clear, dependable power inexpensive (for all earthlings). A 12 months later, the corporate’s operations moved to the NASA Ames Analysis Heart in Silicon Valley, and in 2006, the title was modified to Bloom Power.
Now, 20 years later, Bloom Power has deployed greater than 1.5 GW of low carbon energy throughout greater than 1,200 installations globally—roughly sufficient to energy a couple of million common U.S. properties without delay.
In spite of everything this success, Sridhar nonetheless factors to the lesson Grove bestowed upon him as serving to construct the corporate to what it’s at this time. Although the corporate has confronted a large number of enterprise troubles within the course of (the enterprise has traditionally struggled to be worthwhile) it’s now turning a brand new leaf. It just lately reported a robust 2025 monetary overview, with income hitting $2.02 billion—a 37.3% enhance from the $1.47 billion in 2024.
“We could have died of 1,000 cuts, and there were many circumstances where things are pretty dire for us,” the CEO says. “But my co-workers, my board, will attest to this: there’s not a single night I went home and ever wondered about the future of this company. I knew there was only one option. You’re going to succeed.”
