As more and more of us work in international businesses – with an expanding international customer, supplier and direct employment base – the way we manage cross-border interactions is becoming increasingly critical. The hard reality is how extraordinarily multi-layered this challenge is: it exposes the need for heightened awareness of simple geography through culture to a wide array of differing business practices and regulatory environments. Overlay this with most businesses’ desire to have a common set of corporate-wide values and business practices and you set the scene for a tension which can be electrifyingly powerful or enervating: reconciling the forces of globalisation with difference.

Meeting this challenge is an immense leadership task and not one that comes easily or quickly. It requires an open-minded and enquiring receptiveness to learning about different cultures, and a humble admission that doing so takes time. It demands, where it is possible, the commitment of time to learn about markets in them not remote from them; and a recognition that this learning is a lifelong process.

No section in a book of this kind can really do justice to the complexity of this task, but I have attempted to highlight four areas where I think the committed effective leader should focus:

• international leadership culture – how to develop a culture which spans and yet incorporates national difference;
• international strategy – how international strategy demands a specific approach separate from a single country-focused strategy;
• international prioritisation – how the wealth of opportunity represented by some markets with rising wealth demands tough if not ruthless prioritisation to ensure success; and
• team members in other countries – how managing colleagues in markets away from your home base requires some specific approaches and sensitivity.

This is a set of challenges as great as there is.