The Silo Effect, Gillian Tett
The Silo Effect, Gillian Tett
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The Silo Effect
The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers

Author: Gillian Tett

Narrator: Fiona Hardingham

Unabridged: 10 hr 6 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/01/2015


Synopsis

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 Gillian Tett

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 BillionsFool’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.


Reviews

Fucking brilliant! We are so clever these days that we are going more stupid by the second. We are so deeply thinking that we can't think about things slightly to the side of our daily experience. Our expertise is so advanced it's going to be useless real soon (if it isn't already!). Love it!......more

Goodreads review by Nelson

Gillian Tett é jornalista do Financial Times, colunista de mercados e finanças, e é doutorada em Antropologia Social. Provavelmente este cruzamento de saberes fez com que fosse uma das jornalistas a soar os alarmes para crise financeira em 2006, tendo participado no documentário explicativo da crise......more

Goodreads review by Matt

I was watching a recent episode of Charlie Rose and Gillian Tett was one of his guests (she was quite impressive). She had just completed The Silo Effect and when I heard that title and got a sense of how smart she was from the show I simply had to buy it. And I am so glad I did. The book is so rele......more