The flying wedge

This can certainly be cronyism where an exec brings along an entourage of sycophants to build their own empire on the company's dime.

It can also be a team selected from their broader network of known/proven professionals. People who they already know can work together and produce results.

To steelman this tactic a bit. Put yourself in a new exec's position. You were brought in with specific goals to achieve, and a tight timeframe to show performance. At that level there are no second chances, and no excuses. You've been working long enough to know a number of people who can execute. It will be months before you know what the current team can/can't do, and hiring unknown people is always a dice roll. Early team changes are expected. Conversely if you wait months sifting resumes and building up the existing team, the opportunity to make significant changes will gradually evaporate.

What would you do? Wait and see? Or put a team together of only the top 5% people from all the places you've worked previously?

Another management article, another comfortable metaphor that doesn't say much more than uncomfortable terms like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepotism.

The image of "a formation of enemies smashing through your lines" just offers a sensation of gradually being overwhelmed. It implies more coordination and competency than exists, doesn't convey strategies against the maneuver, and also doesn't describe the consequences. Like the article said, it only applies to big companies and not really to smaller ones.

I think the more fitting metaphor for nepotism is cancer. Friends hiring friends who hire friends often cannot manage their friends; let alone fire their friends. It's unconscious, easy to spread, easy to grow, all natural with bad long-term prospects for the host. Like the author implies, it's not a strategy for the "long game". Too bad management articles can't speak straightly for fear of losing ethically confused readers.

Managers are often hired with the expectation that they will bring in a team with them, or that they have an extended network to pull people from. A lot of people in tech like to believe in meritocracy, but that's not how humans and their organizations really work much of the time.

What seemed quite common for me was(working in European startups): Company gets investment from american investors, investors either recommend synergy with products or bring some trusted executives, new executives bring in their own crew especially at the director/higher management level, goes on to favor their decisions over others who have either more experience or knowledge about the company/product.

Goals are not met, either due to external circumstances or because executive applied strategies they were familiar with from previous gigs but don't fit the reality of that company, executive steps down "voluntarily", their pawns are let go shortly afterwards, hire new executive in place, back to step 1.

A lot of hiring process is less about finding the best candidate, and more about finding a "good enough" candidate with as high a success rate as possible. Hiring is expensive, so minimizing risk is pretty highly valued. People you already know are at least perceived as the lowest risk hires there are. So you hire people you already know, if you can.

One man's cronyism is another's CYA.

"Sluga Narodu", a series where current Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, plays the main character, is about a man who became a president, and wants to do things right. One of his problems is where to find a good team in the country not known for established working procedures to find government professionals. After some attempts he settles on bringing his former colleagues - in fact, high school mates - who might be not the best professionally suited, but have other useful characteristics.

It's a movie, sure, but the problem of creating a good team doesn't look particularly obvious.

I've worked in a company where this was the explicit hiring strategy pursued by new leadership. Two different leaders came in from two different companies (both of which had been acquired and were now seeing a lot of turnover).

In the first case, the new leadership was outside of my department but they were pressuring me as the hiring manager for a role to bring on their people, who "were known 'good' folks". When I interviewed them, the whole interviewing team agreed not to hire them because their skill set may have been good for the company they were at but a complete mismatch for the problems we had. While we didn't ultimately hire them, there was a lot of pressure and lobbying to do so.

In the second case, the new leadership stepped in as head of the department/unit I was running. They took a look at the team we had and our current operating patterns, and decided that it would be faster to replace the team with new people who fit their existing operational model than to transition the existing team over to a new way of working. No one was fired, but it was a "either they fit in with the new model, they quit on their own, or they get performance-reviewed out". The new leader explicitly said that when doing rapid turnarounds, it was easier to bring in a full transplant of their former team than to figure out new patterns of leader-employee collaboration (Not unlike Twitter right now, I'd guess). While I was still a hiring manager for the role, the final approval for a candidate no longer lay with me and many of that new leader's former colleagues were hired. While they had a lot of existing patterns of working with the new leader, their skill sets were again a mismatch for the challenges our team was facing and ended up being a series of net-poor hires who received a lot of air cover from new leadership to not lose face.

That's not to say that you can't have effective recommendations for hiring. Some of the best candidates I've hired have been through personal recommendations or bringing along former team members. My experience has been that this pattern is best tempered by a careful hiring process. It's a great way to put someone into the funnel and ensure they get some visibility, but it's an awful way to accelerate someone through and out of the funnel and onto a team.

Like most patterns the execution is what matters.

I’ve worked closely on 2 occasions with teams that have stuck together across multiple companies.

They were very high performing and the execs were always brought in with the understanding that they would soon bring in “their guys”.

Worked really well, the teams got to work fast, they had their own playbooks, and they shipped with high quality. It would have taken hundreds of hours to interview each of them in the normal process.

This approach only works when there's a lot of fat and churn in hiring where projects get spun up and hiring processes are blocks. This doesn't work well in environments of hiring freezes, project cancellations, and divisional spin-down. The Flying Wedge in artifact of excess and a symptom of organizational hiring and project management dysfunction.

Worked at a company where a new manager who also happened to be a partner at a recruitment agency joined. Wasn’t long before we had a whole bunch of contractors joining from this agency.