Gillian Tett (Financial Times)
Abstract. One of the characteristics of industrial age enterprises is that they are organized around functional departments. This organizational structure results in both limited information and restricted thinking. The Silo Effect asks these basic questions: 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 psychologist Daniel Kahneman put it, are we sometimes so “blind to our own blindness”?
Gillian Tett examines how our tendency to create functional departments—silos—hinders our work and how some people and organizations can break those silos down to unleash innovation.
Gillian is US Managing Editor of the Financial Times and is the award winning author of Saving the Sun: How Wall Street Mavericks Shook Up Japan's Financial World and Made Billions and Fool's Gold: The Inside Story of J.P. Morgan and How Wall St. Greed Corrupted Its Bold Dream and Created a Financial Catastrophe.