Leading Extreme Projects explores the challenges, obstacles and techniques associated with running large projects in some of the most challenging environments and economies in the world. From an oil and gas program in the Amazon with a background of drug trafficking, delicate indigenous communities and some of the most challenging logistics; to a mining project in West Africa involving a consortium of state and private contractors plus a global supply chain. From a shipping efficiency project involving two joint venture programs with stakeholders from the European, North and South American and Asian continents; to a hostile gold project stakeholder management process in Central America involving substantial cultural differences between the north and the south. The authors' insights and advice will help the reader understand the global context of leadership in these extreme projects as well as the nature of the structures and teams required to create, design, operate and transfer global capital programs. In particular, they provide perspectives on the issues of leading cross-cultural teams, working amongst sensitive indigenous people and transferring knowledge to build local capacity. This is an important reference text for senior executives involved in both the strategy and the delivery side of extreme projects, as well as for those researching and studying the field.

As the speed of globalization increases, as companies become flatter, as firms engage in temporary organizations from joint ventures to alliances, and as more business is conducted with virtual teams, there is a need for effective and efficient cross-cultural leadership. It is common today to have virtual teams working in numerous countries from many different personal, societal, and business cultures. Experience gave a glimpse of a pattern of cross-cultural leadership attributes that were accepted and recognized globally (etic): trust, empathy, power, communication and transformation. Starting with a definition of leadership and culture, the work was undertaken to explore, exegetically, the vast literature on leadership and culture, to synthesize it and correlate it to experience and other studies, and to test the validity of the cross-cultural leadership intelligence (XLQ) model that emerged. The definition of cross-cultural leadership we developed is the ability to inspire the desire to follow, and to inspire achievement beyond expectations.