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Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers

The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers

By Gillian Tett

Gillian Tett lays bare "the silo effect" and explains how fragmentation in terms of how people organize themselves, interact with each other, and imagine the world can take hold of an organization and lead to institutional blindness. Spanning Bloomberg's City Hall in New York, the Bank of England in London, Cleveland Clinic hospital in Ohio, Facebook in San Francisco, Sony in Tokyo, and the Chicago Police Department, this book illustrates how stupidly people can behave when they are mastered by silos.

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Book Information

Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publish Date: 09/01/2015
Pages: 304
ISBN-13: 9781451644739
ISBN-10: 1451644736
Language: English

What We're Saying

November 11, 2015

Our General Manager Sally takes a look at the Leadership & Management category of The 2015 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards longlist. READ FULL DESCRIPTION

November 03, 2015

These 40 books—five selections across eight distinct categories—make up the 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards Longlist. READ FULL DESCRIPTION

September 24, 2015

In her new book, Gillian Tett teaches us how to master silos so that they won't master us. READ FULL DESCRIPTION

Full Description

Award-winning journalist Gillian Tett "applies her anthropologist's lens to the problem of why so many organizations still suffer from a failure to communicate. It's a profound idea, richly analyzed" (The Wall Street Journal), about how our tendency to create functional departments--silos--hinders our work. The Silo Effect asks a basic question: why do humans working in modern institutions collectively act in ways that sometimes seem stupid? Why do normally clever people fail to see risks and opportunities that later seem blindingly obvious? Why, as Daniel Kahnemann, the psychologist put it, are we sometimes so "blind to our own blindness"? Gillian Tett, "a first-rate journalist and a good storyteller" (The New York Times), answers these questions by plumbing her background as an anthropologist and her experience reporting on the financial crisis in 2008. In The Silo Effect, she shares eight different tales of the silo syndrome, spanning Bloomberg's City Hall in New York, the Bank of England in London, Cleveland Clinic hospital in Ohio, UBS bank in Switzerland, Facebook in San Francisco, Sony in Tokyo, the BlueMountain hedge fund, and the Chicago police. Some of these narratives illustrate how foolishly people can behave when they are mastered by silos. Others, however, show how institutions and individuals can master their silos instead. "Highly intelligent, enjoyable, and enlivened by a string of vivid case studies....The Silo Effect is also genuinely important, because Tett's prescription for curing the pathological silo-isation of business and government is refreshingly unorthodox and, in my view, convincing" (Financial Times). This is "an enjoyable call to action for better integration within organizations" (Publishers Weekly).

About the Author

Gillian Tett oversees global coverage of the financial markets for the Financial Times , the world's leading newspaper covering finance and business.

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