[schraeds]

"Swat Teams" of vetted talent to handle the most prized assets and initiatives. Let the cruft keep up day to day, apply proven talent to the most important initiatives piece by piece. ie. Apple and the iMac, then iPod, iBook, iWorks, Final Cut etc etc.

[demallien]

I actually work in exactly this type of swat team. We were all hired at well above standard payrates at my large company to build the next generation product. The response from the existing teams was immediate - they saw us as a threat, and started doing everything they could to make our project fail. In the end they succeeded in gimping the product by simply giving us interfaces that just couldn't do what a good product needed. The swat team was dragged into mediocrity. Now many of those rather expensive hires are actively looking to move elsewhere.

Moral of the story - building a star team in an existing company is a good way of building resentment about that team and is unlikely to breed success.

[PakG1]

This is why such swat teams need to be hidden or actively shielded. Motorola's Droid team was completely separate and able to stand on its own feet. The Google Wave team was based in Australia and had its own incentives and structure. Obviously, swat teams are hit and miss like any startup; they're essentially startups within a corporation.

Or you need to be actively shielded. I was part of such a swat team for internal tools in my first job out of university. The IT department did everything possible to kill us, get us fired, etc. We needed support from the CEO down to stay alive. In the days before I came on board, our managers and directors would disguise the team, telling other people, "Ah, they're just business analysts working on miscellaneous stuff. Not important. Ignore them."

[ichattopadhyaya]

I know why Flickr is doing so well. It is shielded and isolated from the rest of its parent organization.

[xxpor]

Why didn't they give you the power to demand things from other teams, lest they be fired?

[chime]

You can demand a functional API but you cannot demand a reliable service. That is what they've been unable to provide in the first place.

[demallien]

Well, there are several reasons. One is that this is France, and firing people is just more hassle than it is worth. Th second, and more generally applicable reason, is that that would involve changing the status quo. If changing the status quo was that easy, you wouldn't need a SWAT team...

[jleader]

When I left Yahoo in 2008, they had such a "swat team", at least for software development (they called it a "tiger team"). Unfortunately, I don't think Yahoo's main problems at that time were technological. Maybe they needed a similar approach to product management?