For any jobless finance executives contemplating a career move into the development world, Jacqueline Novogratz’s book, The Blue Sweater, should be required reading. For while Ms Novogratz has long demonstrated the potential of applying business ideas to development problems, her memoir provides sobering accounts of the shocks and frustrations likely to be encountered along the way.

The book relates how she left international banking for an adventure in Africa that proved the starting point for a career as a philanthropist with a mission to change radically the way the problems of the developing world are approached.