When Andrew Clark swapped his job as a Washington-based fraud investigation manager at Ernst & Young to work in Argentina for Progen, the country’s only distributor of generic medicines, he found himself working from the company’s conference room and having to run down to the local market to make photocopies. For Mr Clark, this was not a step backwards in his career but an opportunity offered by Ernst & Young’s Corporate Responsibility Fellows programme.

The unfamiliarity of his new role was exhilarating. “This is the best executive leadership programme imaginable,” Mr Clark says. “All the stuff that makes life easy in my day-to-day job was taken away from me and I had to work with what I had.”