Mass Defections

Mass Defections

Cazenove's US equity analysts staged a mass defection today, leaving in a chunk of 18 and forming a new company. You don't usually see everybody in an office walk out together.

I have been in two environments where that really should have happened -- Gobi and Virgin. It didn't happen because of the personalities of leadership, weakness of cohesion among the members of the team, lack of a common view about the future.

The guys leaving Cazenove are going to form a new company called Atlantic Equities. Have they got clients already? Or is it just a startup (it seems so according to the article)?

Given the risk in the new venture, why are these guys leaving Cazenove? Even so, why is *everyone* leaving? That is the key question. There are always some risk-taking characters, but there are also many cowards (as I have seen first hand). Admittedly, Cazenove is hurting this year as its performance suffers. But the same was true at Gobi and actually at Virgin too (all kinds of bad ideas and directions being taken that anyone could see).

Perhaps it's because these guys were all tightly bonded together in the NY office, far from HQ in London.

Or perhaps the bankers have a more loyal culture with their bosses. You hear about moves like this on Wall St all the time -- my friend Martin was part of something like this a few years back leaving DLJ for Lehman -- but you don't hear about things like this in, say, consulting.

So that's what I'm curious about. How do you engineer a mass-defection?