“It's hard to imagine a place more exciting to work...the challenges in terms of weather and ice, and the level of expectation was high,” Fox said. “For me, as a young man working in that environment, my report every day went to the top people in the company.”

It was an experience that he had dreamed of in previous years, as a young man growing up in rural Georgia, where there was “not a lot of opportunity.”

After earning a bachelor's degree in mathematics, with cum laude honors, from University of Georgia in Athens in 1974, Fox headed for Louisiana to look for an oil industry job.

“I put out 88 resumes to oil and gas service companies...Shell was one of the early ones that gave me a shot and put me to work as a roughneck. I had a lot of fun,” Fox said. “Most of the others wouldn't hire me because I didn't have experience but Shell took a chance...I didn't know a rig from nothing.”

Fox worked all over the world for Shell, including the Gulf of Mexico, the north and mid-Atlantic, in Brazil, Syria and the North Sea. It took him nine years to get to Alaska as a drilling supervisor.

“I loved the adventure of working in the waters off the coast of Alaska,” Fox said. “We would spend nine months planning for three months of doing...working through every detail so we would go out prepared.

“Working up here does demand it - that level of preparation and thought, attention to detail and commitment to that. That's why we were so successful,” he said.

The enthusiasm and effort that Fox put into his work in Alaska paid off, as he received his first of several Shell President's Award for Team Excellence as a member of the Chukchi Sea exploration team.

That exploration project faced intense environmental scrutiny as it was completed during the 1989 season, just after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. “People were very conscious about how the world was watching us,” Fox said. “There was a heightened sense of awareness.”

Shell found oil off the shores of Alaska during the 1980s, but existing technology, coupled with market conditions at the time, made production uneconomic. As a proven leader with valuable operating experience and the ability to put together successful teams, Fox was reassigned from Alaska, a move that left him “broken-hearted,” he said.

But unlike many successful individuals who leave Alaska to advance in their career track, Fox has been able to return to the Last Frontier to head up a major new project for his company.

Fox returned to Alaska in January 2006 to serve as Shell's Alaska asset manager, overseeing the company's renewed efforts offshore in the Beaufort and the Chukchi.

Shell's reentry into Alaska included plans for a multi-year, multi-well exploration program in the Beaufort starting this past summer. Despite setbacks in the approval process that kept the company from drilling, the program did complete some valuable equipment and field work, Fox said in late October.

“We're early in the life of a multi-year program. We're disappointed that we couldn't drill,” he said. “We absolutely want to get it right and will continue to work in that direction.”

Building an organization, solving problems and turning around troubled projects are all characteristic of Fox's past experience with Shell, though he's modest and quick to share the success of previous work with others.

“I've been part of a lot of successful campaigns...somehow, people perform better than expected when trying to help me,” he said. “I seem to surround myself with great people who are very like-minded. They surprise themselves with how well they do.”

After his experience in Alaska in the 1980s, Fox headed up Shell's auger project, the company's first deepwater development. In 1994, he took over Shell's major projects operations team responsible for the company's subsea projects.

Shell's largest offshore platform, Ursa, located 65 miles offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, provided Fox with a substantial challenge in 1996 - the project was six months behind in construction, a delay that cost the company $250 million, according to industry publications.

Fox was operations manager for the $1.45 billion project. He implemented new technology for construction design and new leadership strategies with the construction and operational team he assembled for Ursa

Eventually, Ursa's construction was completed four months ahead of schedule, saving an estimated $40 million. Additionally, operating costs were decreased by more than 50 percent from the business plan and the group achieved a “Best in Class” uptime performance of 99 percent.

Ursa's subsequent production rates, safety record, employee morale and environmental standards have all been recognized within the industry.

Following that success, Fox took over as Shell America's operations capability manager, in charge of developing and executing people strategies to assure achievement of the company's goals, his assignment before returning to Alaska.

A 30-plus year career with one company in the highly transient oil industry is somewhat of an anomaly. Fox admitted to sometimes wanting to quit.