Ten years ago Johns Hopkins Medicine International, where I’m the CEO, joined forces with Anadolu, a Turkish charitable foundation, to build and operate a state-of-the-art medical center in Istanbul. The project’s success would depend on putting the right executives in place—managers experienced in the operational and clinical challenges that leading hospitals must face. Hopkins was prepared to draw them from within its own ranks, but Turkish law prohibits noncitizens from running hospitals. And yet finding qualified Turkish executives proved impossible. How could we manage a large, complex project in a country whose laws prevented us from hiring the right people for key leadership roles?
A version of this article appeared in the June 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review.