How Turkcell built one of the world's fastest networks

As the CEO of Turkcell Group, Sureyya Ciliv sits at the helm of one of Europe's most important telecom giants. He is also a key player in the roaring Turkish economy. (Turkish GDP growth even outpaced China's earlier this year.) And that has put the 53-year-old executive in the position of offering some guidance to neighbors in the much-troubled Eurozone as well as to stagnating Western powers farther abroad. His idea? Privately funded investment in infrastructure.

Ciliv has the clout to be doling out advice. Since he was made CEO four years ago, Turkcell has grown from 44.9 million subscribers to 61.7 million in Turkey and eight other countries in the region. Ciliv pushed Turkcell into new markets, most recently Germany, while building on positions through its Fintur subsidiary and others. Overall, Turkcell leads the market in Turkey, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Northern Cyprus. It also has toeholds in Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova. In an August study, Turkcell's data download speeds in Turkey for phones on its 3G network were rated the fastest for those of 53 industrial nations -- including ones in North America -- by telecom giant Ericsson. Now plugged into his home country's centers of power, Ciliv spent many years in the United States, graduating from Harvard Business School in 1983 before co-founding an information management solutions company, Novasoft Systems. He left Novasoft in 1997 to head up Microsoft's operations in Turkey. By 2000, he'd risen to an executive role in worldwide sales and marketing back in Redmond, WA. He's been CEO of Turkcell, based in Istanbul, since January 2007.