The revolving door to many Fortune 100 executive suites has been turning 360 degrees in recent years as employees who leave to broaden their experience, increasingly find themselves returning to the fold.

 The “boomerang employee”, someone who leaves a workplace only to return later in their career, is a growing phenomenon that can be explained in part by the number of former Fortune 100 companies actively running alumni programmes. There is no general rule as to why executives check out and then check back in to a familiar workplace but in the following two part series, we attempt to analyse some of the trends and challenges involved, via the story of six very different executives around the world.