It is exactly like Boris sometimes says about projects which are too easy to execute: ‘It is like going to the client’s office, taking money from his petty cash box and going home. The more time you spend in the client’s office, the more time you get alone with the petty cash box.’

(He is being humorous Diary! Of course we do this only after delivering high-value strategic business advice. Except in the case of Vinci Electronics. But that was a complete misunderstanding. I thought the petty cash box was the ‘Quality Management Revolution 2007 Feedback Repository’ and took it home for analysis. Then in the whole rush of making final presentations, client dinners and closure meetings I forgot to give it back. After two or three months it would look suspicious if I suddenly one day turned up with the missing petty cash box. So I kept it.)

And then Arindam Ganguly destroyed the secondment opportunity for all of us. Traitorous bastard.

Arindam was an associate in the Mumbai office when he went on a secondment to the Colombo office of a Colombo-based bank called Colombo BankTrust Bank of Colombo.

CB and TBC had just finished merging and Arindam went for a post-merger integration project. Like everyone else he should have quietly gone there and tried to make us as much money as possible, and scored criminal points on his corporate American Express Card without compromising on his deliverables.

Instead he performed so well that CBTBC decided to hire him full-time. Which is fine. (Bad career move.) But they also wanted him to poach all the Dufresne finance experts as well. Over a period of six months Arindam kept making trips to Mumbai and slowly convinced seven of Dufresne’s best consultants and the hottest babe in marketing (7.3/10 in office attire on the Varghese scale) to move with him to Colombo.

This immediately became a global Dufresne scandal. (Not as big as the Varghese Voicemail of 2006. Very very small in comparison.)

Informally the company banned all secondments.

So you can imagine, Diary, how much I had to fight to get my secondment approved. I had to use every ounce of my ‘youngest business management guru’ reputation and media exposure to get Boris to agree.

Finally he let me go on the condition that I did not use voicemail, YouTube or advice Lederman on purchasing policy or logistics while I was in London.

Also I was supposed to send a copy of any email to him before sending it to anyone else at Lederman.

Basically he was trying to control every single element of my trip and make it almost impossible for me to deliver any independent value to the client. Still Lederman was offering me 3000 pounds a week, so I was ok with the compromise.

So I did not object to him too much.