The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers Audiobook (Free)

Award-winning journalist Gillian Tett “applies her anthropologist’s zoom lens to the problem of why so many organizations still have problems with a failure to communicate. It’s a serious idea, richly analyzed” (The Wall Street Journal), about how exactly our tendency to produce useful departments-silos-hinders our function.

The Silo Effect asks a simple question: why do humans employed in modern institutions collectively act with techniques that sometimes seem stupid? Why perform normally smart people fail to find risks and about The Silo Effect: The Peril of Knowledge and the Promise of WEARING DOWN Barriers possibilities that later appear blindingly apparent? Why, as Daniel Kahnemann, the psychologist put it, are we occasionally so “blind to your own blindness”?

Gillian Tett, “a first-rate journalist and a good storyteller” (THE BRAND NEW York Occasions), answers these questions by plumbing her background as an anthropologist and her experience reporting for the financial crisis in 2008. In The Silo Effect, she shares eight different stories of the silo symptoms, spanning Bloomberg’s City Hall in NY, the Bank of England in London, Cleveland Medical center medical center in Ohio, UBS lender in Switzerland, Facebook in San Francisco, Sony in Tokyo, the BlueMountain hedge finance, and the Chicago law enforcement. A few of these narratives illustrate how foolishly people can behave when they are learned by silos. Others, however, show how organizations and people can grasp their silos rather.

“Highly intelligent, enjoyable, and enlivened with a string of vivid case studies….The Silo Effect is also truly 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). That is “an enjoyable call to action for better integration within institutions” (Web publishers Weekly).