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

From award-winning columnist and journalist Gillian Tett comes a brilliant examination of 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.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, journalist and senior editor for the Financial Times, answers these questions by plumbing her background as an anthropologist and her experience reporting on the financial crisis in 2008.