Financial Times: WHEN GLOBAL INTERESTS CLASH WITH DOMESTIC ARRANGEMENTS: “The rise of the dual-career couple has made it harder for multinational companies to send employees on expatriate assignments, as Linda Cook knows from personal experience.”: Mobility is made even more complicated for international energy groups as they are forced to seek new reserves in ever remoter and more hostile parts of the world.”: Wednesday 23 November 2005

By Alison Maitland

Published: November 23 2005

The rise of the dual-career couple has made it harder for multinational companies to send employees on expatriate assignments, as Linda Cook knows from personal experience. She was part of such a couple until her husband gave up his job so that she could move to Europe from the US in 1998 to be director of strategy and business development on Shell's exploration and production executive committee.

Mobility is made even more complicated for international energy groups as they are forced to seek new reserves in ever remoter and more hostile parts of the world. "I'm very sympathetic to the dilemmas these people face when they're offered an opportunity to move that doesn't fit their partners' career aspirations," she says.

"I tell them: if it doesn't work for you now, keep an open mind, your situation might change in the future."

Ms Cook, who is also a director of Boeing, does not have a complicated philosophy of leadership. "First it's about setting strategy, making sure you're externally focused, that you understand what's happening in the marketplace, with supply, with demand, what the customers are wanting, and what you have inside the company to differentiate yourself so that you can win.

"Then it's making sure the leadership team is aligned and everyone understands that we're all heading in the same direction, which isn't easy in a global business like this."

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