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I did a costings exercise for a large firm a year or two ago. Turns out that with a 20 partner firm (130 employees total), it's cheaper to rent a beautiful office with enough meeting room space for the partners in Belgravia, move the entire workforce to Southern India (or any one of a number of beautiful island nations), rent office space there, and fly the partners backwards and forwards as their schedules demand, even when factoring in fees not earned whilst in flight (despite that fees could be earned in flight)... than it is to keep all 125 staff in their Central London office.

A back of envelope calculation suggests that firms that have a few large satellite offices could benefit from doing the same thing (satellite meeting space, outsourced workforce).

Food for thought? The more I look at it the more disgusted I am by modern economics and the increasing tendancy of large firms to behave like MBA-led US PLCs...