Case study of leadership crossing borders: the Burma Skincare Initiative

Leadership that crosses borders almost by definition involves complexity. This chapter describes the journey of the Burma Skincare Initiative (BSI) – a charity devoted to improving the skincare of people in Myanmar (Burma) through education, research and clinical service provision. Turning challenges into opportunities, the BSI established a sustainable collaboration with local and international partners; it expeditiously achieved many goals before COVID-19 and a military coup d’état brought a rapidly escalating humanitarian crisis and fragmentation of an already fragile healthcare system. A determination to find new, often several, routes to achieve their goals - the reverse prism principle - defined the BSI’s leadership. The BSI team became experts in politics, publicity and high-level diplomacy in order to promulgate an essential emergency skincare agenda which provided dermatology expertise to frontline healthcare services during unprecedented times. The BSI remains committed to its vision of establishing a regional dermatology training and research centre in Myanmar.