That sort of nepotism can be a problem. It's why Amazon's search sucks so bad. In the book 'The Everything Store', it tells the story of when a team at Amazon responsible for something else saw how bad search was and decided to fix it. So they built a prototype with Elasticsearch and whatnot. It worked great. The dude at the head of the search team, good friends with Bezos, got all territorial and angry. Bezos solution? Have a test between the two solutions to determine which was best. Bezos idiocy? He let the head of the search team decide who won. So, no surprise, the head of the search team said the search team won. So the improved search was shut down and the garbage search we all have to deal with regularly got to stay.

Once you've got that kind of thing going on, only retirements and deaths can effect good change at an organization.