Crisis Management
Sarah Nelson Smith is the regional general counsel for WeWork, an international company that transforms buildings into collaborative workspaces and communities. While in her previous role as European chief legal officer of KFC, she helped to steer the company successfully through the #chickencrisis of 2018, when a distribution failure led to the closure of the majority of KFC’s restaurants in the UK.
In an exclusive extract from her new book You Didn’t Mention The Piranhas, Nelson Smith writes candidly about how it feels to be in the middle of a PR crisis:
In the second week of the crisis, the snow came. It had toyed with us for several days, threatening a festive dusting, but then changed tack and engulfed the country in a thick white blanket, mocking the valiant efforts to get trucks loaded and onto the roads by rendering many of them impassable. I needed to get to Rugby, but living at the bottom of a hill on a country lane with a rear-wheel drive car, I had no hope.
