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The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers Paperback – September 27, 2016

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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).

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304 pages
Language

English
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September 27, 2016
Dimensions

5.5 x 0.76 x 9.25 inches
ISBN-10

9781451644746
ISBN-13

978-1451644746
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for THE SILO EFFECT

“Highly intelligent, enjoyable and enlivened by a string of vivid case studies. It is also genuinely important, because her prescription for curing the pathological silo-isation of business and government isr efreshingly unorthodox and, in my view, convincing.” —Financial Times

“A complex topic and lively writing make this an enjoyable call to action for better integration within organizations.”— Publishers Weekly

"In“The Silo Effect” she 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

"’Silo’has become a cliché among management consultants—and executives trying to hang onto their jobs by speaking the language of the au courant—but Tett gives the metaphor life in her engaging, case-study-filled new book.” —New York Post

“The Silo Effect comes across in print much as Tett comes across in person—sharp, insightful, and concise. And the book, which is informed as much by her training as an academic anthropologist as by her experience covering the global financial crisis, is an excellent attempt to help both organizations and individuals figure out how to harness the benefits of specialization without creating tunnel vision.”—Strategy+Business

“The Silo Effect comes across in print much as Tett comesacross in person—sharp, insightful, and concise. And the book…is an excellentattempt to help both organizations and individuals figure out how to harnessthe benefits of specialization without creating tunnelvision.”—Strategy+Business

“A complex topic and lively writing make this an enjoyable call to action for better integration within organizations.” ― Publishers Weekly

“Highly intelligent, enjoyable and enlivened by a string of vivid case studies. It is also genuinely important, because her prescription for curing the pathological silo-isation of business and government is refreshingly unorthodox and, in my view, convincing.” ― Financial Times

"In “The Silo Effect” she 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

"’Silo’ has become a cliché among management consultants—and executives trying to hang onto their jobs by speaking the language of the au courant—but Tett gives the metaphor life in her engaging, case-study-filled new book.” ― New York Post

About the Author

Gillian Tett chairs the editorial board, US, for the Financial Times and writes columns for the world’s leading newspaper covering finance, business, and the political economy. She has been named British Journalist of the Year, Columnist of the Year, and Business Journalist of the Year in the UK and won two Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing awards in the US. She speaks regularly at conferences around the world on finance and global markets and has a PhD in social anthropology from Cambridge University. Tett is the author of Saving the Sun: How Wall Street Mavericks Shook Up Japan’s Financial World and Made Billions, Fool’s Gold: The Inside Story of J.P. Morgan and How Wall St. Greed Corrupted Its Bold Dream and Created a Financial Catastrophe, and The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1451644744
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition (September 27, 2016)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781451644746
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1451644746
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.76 x 9.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #390,893 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #257 in Banks & Banking (Books)
- #2,976 in Business Processes & Infrastructure
- #3,090 in Business Management (Books)

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4.3 310 ratings

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Gillian Tett

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Gillian Tett serves as the chair of the editorial board and editor-at-large, US of the Financial Times. She writes weekly columns, covering a range of economic, financial, political and social issues. She is also the co-founder of FT Moral Money, a twice weekly newsletter that tracks the ESG revolution in business and finance which has since grown to be a staple FT product.

Previously, Tett was the FT’s US managing editor from 2013 to 2019. She has also served as assistant editor for the FT’s markets coverage, capital markets editor, deputy editor of the Lex column, Tokyo bureau chief, Tokyo correspondent, London-based economics reporter and a reporter in Russia and Brussels.

Tett is the author of The Silo Effect, which looks at the global economy and financial system through the lens of cultural anthropology. She also authored Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe, a 2009 New York Times bestseller and Financial Book of the Year at the inaugural Spear’s Book Awards. Additionally, she wrote the 2003 book Saving the Sun: A Wall Street Gamble to Rescue Japan from its Trillion Dollar Meltdown. Her next book, Anthro-Vision, A New Way to See Life and Business will come out in June 2021.

Tett has received honorary degrees from the Carnegie Mellon, Baruch, the University of Miami in the US, and from Exeter, London and Lancaster University in the UK.

In 2014, Tett won the Royal Anthropological Institute Marsh Award. She has been named Columnist of the Year (2014), Journalist of the Year (2009)and Business Journalist of the Year (2008) at the British Press Awards, and won two awards from the Society of American Business and Economics Writers. Other awards include a President’s Medal by the British Academy (2011), and being recognized as Senior Financial Journalist of the Year (2007) by the Wincott Awards

Before joining the Financial Times in 1993, Tett was awarded a PhD in social anthropology from Cambridge University based on field work in the former Soviet Union. While pursuing the PhD, she freelanced for the FT and the BBC. She is a graduate of Cambridge University.

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Rob Galbraith

Life changing perspective from one of our finest journalists today

Reviewed in the United States on January 21, 2016

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I have been a big fan of Gillian Tett's writing and columns in the Financial Times for years. Now she has truly outdone herself by writing a piercing insightful book about how we unconsciously categorize our world and the inherent risks and missed opportunities this creates when we fail to question our categories, buckets, or silos. Tett's relies on her training and experience as an anthropologist as well as her years of experience as one of our Britian's most respected journalists (and one of America's keenest observers) to demonstrate that a major failing of our times is the inability to question HOW we view and process information and data in today's Information Age. While technology, the Internet, and social media have made it cheaper and easier to share information and connect with others across the globe, we have not kept up as humans with the need to "re-wire" our ways of thinking and our taxonomies and heuristics that we use to make sense of the world.

We face a central paradox today: with the rate of information being produced and disseminated is exploding and our base of knowledge growing exponentially, humans must be increasingly specialized in their jobs and daily lives. However, this specialization creates silos - and we do not always question the gaps in our knowledge or categorizations, nor are we always aware that this specialization creates its own "languages" that make it easy to communicate with others within a specialization, but very challenging to communicate with those outside of our specialization. As a result, gaps exist and we do no have the complete picture of how the world truly works that we might think we do. Tett's does an excellent job showing how this can lead us astray. in particular, her discussion of the Great Financial Crisis and challenges at UBS and JPMorgan in identifying risks, even when those banks had at army of people looking for them, is quite compelling. While it's much easier to blame greedy Wall Street bankers and captive regulators as villains, it's much more accurate (and disturbing) to say that the world of finance is too complex for humans to effectively manage without close collaboration over multiple disciplines.

After highlighting the ways silos can blind us to problems and risks, Tett's goes on in the second half of the book to discuss some approaches to breaking down these silos. Tett emphasizes repeatedly that any initial successes she highlights are not guaranteed to be enduring and that constant vigilance is required to overcome the temptation to close ranks and retreat to our own silos, turning a blind eye to potential problems - and opportunities. Awareness is truly half the battle here, and trial-and-error is likely needed to overcome the challenges at silos bring. In the final chapter, Tett does an excellent job summarizing some of the practical ideas and approaches that appear to hold promise in overcoming silos and helping us all adjust to our new daily reality of the Information Age in the twenty-first century.

This book comes with my highest recommendation - a great companion to Gen. Stanley McChrystal's Team of Teams which highlights many of the same challenges and suggests ways to overcome them based on his experiences leading the anti-terrorism efforts for the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both are must reads for anyone leading or working in a large organization in today's hyperconnected (yet surprisingly still isolated) world.

One person found this helpful

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Silos and social change

Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2015

Verified Purchase

rarely have I read a book as thought provoking as Gillian Tett, The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers.

“Silo” is a buzzword for those of us who work in peacebuilding or just about any other public policy issue, the political versions of these agricultural structures are a constant and frustrating obstacle for those of us working for deep and lasting social change. Tett’s book is particularly useful for people like me because she deals with silos in three new, refreshing, and creative ways.

First, silos are a problem everywhere, not just in government bureaucracy. In fact, Tett draws almost all of her examples from the private sector. Everywhere we look, companies are failing because they cannot or will not share information, ideas, and personnel across administrative lines. Whether you are worried about our failure to anticipate big events like 9/11 or the great recession we are now finally emerging from, rigid bureaucratic structures are an obstacle any organization has to overcome in a world in which rapid change is the only constant.

Second, Tett is an anthropologist by training. As a result, it is all but natural for her to cover people like a startup mogul turned police officer or a dyslexic physician who view the world through unusual mental lenses. Although she doesn’t use the term, each of her “heroes” has an uncanny ability to view a previously vexing problem from a new perspective that is more in keeping with the network based world we live in rather than one in which hierarchical, top-down models worked well.

Third, the book is filled with implications for readers who aren’t interested in big data, finance, pubic health, or the other examples she raises. Whatever your field, her conclusions about the fact that new ideas typically come from “left field” and are often introduced by outliers or what some public health experts call “positive deviants” applies to us all.

In closing, it might seem ironic that a book about sweeping change was written by a journalist at the Financial Times. However, it says something about the nature of our times that calls for sweeping change comes from a journalist at a newspaper known for its support of the status quo (albeit one that was just sold). But it also says something that the FT hired and promoted a writer who is as comfortably talking about courting rituals in rural France in the 1950s as she is about high finance.

18 people found this helpful

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katalaveno33

How we work in an effort or organization, by an anthropologist who knows!

Reviewed in the United States on October 16, 2022

Verified Purchase

Forcefully presented description of how to operate an interprize ;or a country, utilizing our human
predilections and needs or: ignoring same and crashing-and-burning. Many fascinating examples related
by one "who vas there, Charilie!".
Recommended

Reviewed in the United States on February 28, 2022

Verified Purchase

Anyone who has worked in organizational change or community transformation understands the challenge of overcoming silos. But few of us have a deeper understanding beyond thinking about “stakeholders”. Here, Tett takes us on a tour and introduces us to a deeper set of insights. As an anthropologist deeply grounded in the intricacies of financial engineering, she helps us understand how silos present an ongoing risk of deregulated financial markets. Her presentation goes beyond finance, but I found these chapters in her book fascinating.

Her conclusion: we need silos of expertise, but we must also balance these silos with explicit strategies to increase the flow of information and, more important, the categories we use to make meaning from these flows.

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Harold Haynes

Excellent Insight and Analysis

Reviewed in Canada on January 12, 2019

Verified Purchase

Great book that speaks to the pitfalls of "silo thinking" and; ways in which they can be avoided. Based on data and research, it is an important read for anyone that wants to "think and live outside the box". Now, if I could only get the decision makers in my organization to read, and embrace the principles here, I would be pleased.

Carla Pereira Correia

Carla Pereira

Reviewed in Spain on November 25, 2015

Verified Purchase

The book never arrived.

I was refunded.

No tracking number. I dont know here is the book.

Very bad service.

Gary Hannam

We owe this to ourselves

Reviewed in Germany on September 25, 2015

Verified Purchase

Nothing in this world is fixed in stone, though most people accept this to be so. A guide to seeing alternative worlds.

Client Amazon

How to recognize silos -- and fight them!

Reviewed in Canada on November 20, 2019

Verified Purchase

Gillian Tett beats to death one of the most pernicious effect of specialization of labor and partitioning of large organizations. Packed with examples of miserable consequences from silos and spectacularly effective silo-busting strategies.

Salish Coast Reader

Three Stars

Reviewed in Canada on May 3, 2016

Verified Purchase

new-ish thoughts, new-ish examples solid if not outstanding analysis but light on providing analytical silo removal tools and process

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