When a crisis hits, it is the brand that is the first (and very public) casualty. However, it is within the organisation that the repercussions play out most deeply. Customers question the product, regulators question the process, but employees question whether their leadership can be trusted to tell them what is really happening. Each of these audiences is watching the others, and a message that rings true outside the company but hollow inside it does not hold for long. The people who own the external story and those who own the internal one rarely plan for a crisis together.

In this session, Suresh Narayanan will draw on his new book, Courage Under Fire, to unpack how trust breaks and how it is rebuilt. Taking over as head of Nestlé India just as the Maggi ban hit in 2015, he had to win back consumers and steady a workforce at the same time. He will examine why employees are a leader’s first (and most important) audience in a crisis; where the CHRO and CMO must work together to forge a single narrative; and what the Maggi crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic and the Arab Spring taught him about leading from the front.