Courage Under Fire: Chronicles of hard-won lessons in crises and leadership

Suresh Narayanan's memoir offers thoughtful lessons in crisis management and leadership, drawing on the Maggi controversy, Covid-19 and crises across global markets

Courage Under Fire: Leadership Lessons from the Arab Spring, Maggi Crisis, Covid & More

by Suresh Narayanan

Published by Penguin

232 pages ₹699

 

In Courage Under Fire, Suresh Narayanan, former chairman and managing director of fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) giant Nestlé India, saves what he considers the biggest corporate sector crisis that he faced for last. This choice of narrative, which covers his experiences in crisis management during the 2008 global financial crisis, the Arab Spring in 2011 and typhoons in Southeast Asia, makes for a slow start. 

Once you are used to the pace, Mr Narayanan’s book, a memoir and management textbook rolled into one, reveals a thoughtful voice that has much to offer professionals who are looking to get a grip on crisis management. 

His story takes a long arc of travel — from Singapore and Egypt before reaching the Philippines. In 2015, just four months into his tenure in the Philippines, he was told to proceed to India, where the Maggi controversy had turned up the heat on the Swiss FMCG giant. 

Though homecoming is the flavour of the season, thanks to Christopher Nolan’s recent magnum opus based on the Homeric epic, The Odyssey, Mr Narayanan would have done well to conform to another Greek storytelling technique — starting the story in medias res .  

When Mr Narayanan took charge of Nestlé India, the company stood accused by the Indian food safety regulator of having higher than permitted lead and monosodium glutamate in its bestselling noodles brand. As the case reached Bombay High Court, he oversaw the withdrawal of stocks from markets as well as consumers’ homes and their destruction. This impacted, he writes, 7,200 factory workers across eight plants, 1,400 distributors, 400,000 farmers and 15,000 spice farmers. 

Speaking to multiple internal and external stakeholders suggested that, although people believed in the company, it had been slow to respond to the controversy. Mr Narayanan tries to differentiate the Maggi controversy from those that rival FMCG companies faced. Where chocolate makers and cola companies faced internal and quality-related crises, it was Food Safety and Standards Authority of India that took a stand against Nestlé Maggi, he writes, and raised the stakes for the company. 

Though he advocates ideals of consultative leadership, team participation and openness to ideas, Mr Narayanan admits that he decided on a set path to steer the company through the controversy. He offers insights into how the five-month revamp turned out to be an opportunity for the company to speed up its turnaround time and even venture into the e-commerce sales channel, driving a more forceful comeback for a brand that has a cult following across generations. 

His handling of the Maggi controversy is a useful study in corporate crisis management, but readers may find the chapter on managing the Covid-19 crisis more poignant. Mr Narayanan discusses the sense of solitude while working from home and the sense of responsibility that he felt towards Nestlé India’s workforce. Vulnerability is often touted as a key leadership trait. Mr Narayanan walks this talk, admitting to being overwhelmed when talking about colleagues who had succumbed to the virus during a company town hall.  

Another important aspect of this chapter is the forecasting and preparedness that large corporations inculcate. Mr Narayanan mentions that during a panel discussion in early 2020, when he was asked about the clampdown by Chinese authorities as the Covid-19 virus spread, he did not downplay the threat. Leadership, he reasoned, is not about platitudes but speaking your mind and seeking to understand a problem you may know nothing about.  

Under his leadership, the company began planning in advance for a potential crisis if the Covid-19 virus spread in India. To be sure, the March 2020 lockdown imposed by the government impacted supply chains, pushing retail channels off track. That did not prevent the company from ensuring that supplies were ramped up to ensure reach and availability for customers, Mr Narayanan writes. He adds that Nestlé India decided against layoffs. At a time when tech giants have normalised layoffs, his emphasis on treating employees humanely stands out. 

An economist by training — he holds a Master’s degree from the Delhi School of Economics — his approach towards discussing the qualities of a good leader occasionally borders on the academic. He prioritises values and conduct over any key performance indicators (KPIs), that corporate sector metric that rears its head in every evaluation cycle. However, he does not lose sight of measurability, saying that “leadership is about results”, and “sometimes as leaders, we mistake process or status quo as outcomes, which is when the leader loses resonance and outcomes become amorphous”. 

Much emphasis is placed on managing emotions, making choices for the greater good and even on the intelligence of lay people such as his grandmother, whose words he found “more valuable than anything I had learnt in business school”. While the book would have benefitted from a faster pace, it is to Mr Narayanan’s credit that he keeps the focus on crisis management and leadership instead of himself. His academic approach enables discovery and deeper understanding if a reader stays patiently with the book until the end.