"It was a bold bet, but Kumar didn't flinch from making it, " says Sumant Sinha, Birla's former finance head, who now chairs Savant Advisors, a Mumbai corporate finance consultancy.

FORBES: Magazine Article

The people who are willing to move to, say, the north of England, tend to be northerners who always planned to move back, says Patrick Gatenby, northern regional manager of Michael Page Finance, a recruitment consultancy.

ECONOMIST: Decentralising government is sensible but difficult

With a BA in history from UC Berkeley, and several years of developing digital marketing strategy in the heart of the Hollywood, Zim may not seem to fit the classic MBA profile, dominated as it is by students from the fields of finance, engineering and consultancy.

FORBES: Shaking the MBA Martini: Diversity Is the New Cocktail

One company that has considered a merger in the past year is the Trinsum Group, which is itself the product of a union in early 2007 between Marakon, a strategy consultancy, and Integrated Finance, a financial- and risk-consulting company that includes Robert Merton, a Nobel prize-winning economist, among its founders.

ECONOMIST: Management consulting

The CEBR, a consultancy that tracks the London economy, reckons City-type jobs (including in business services linked to finance) will fall by 27, 000 this year to around 288, 000, almost a fifth below their pre-crisis peak.

ECONOMIST: London as a financial centre