Bloom Energy CEO K.R. Sridhar still recalls the tension in that 2009 meeting room. Three-ring binders stuffed with data lay open. His team had laid out every metric. Yet former Intel CEO Andy Grove ignored them all. Sridhar, then pushing 50, had founded Bloom Energy just years earlier, adapting NASA tech meant for Mars to generate clean power on Earth. Manufacturing had hit a wall. Scalability eluded them. Desperate, he called in Grove, the Hungarian immigrant who turned Intel into a semiconductor giant. Grove cleared the room. Only Sridhar and his board remained. “What’s wrong?” Grove asked. Once. Twice. Three times. Sridhar froze. Finally, Grove cut through: “You’re extremely bright, you’re extremely smart. You’re going to figure this out. You don’t need me coming here and looking at these three-ring binders to figure out what’s wrong.” The real issue? Sridhar hadn’t walked the factory floor. Hadn’t asked the workers building the fuel cells what wasn’t working.…