The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise, and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Gillian Tett (Author), Eilidh L. Beaton (Narrator), Audible Studios (Publisher)

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In The Silo Effect, award-winning journalist Gillian Tett examines the structural development of institutions such as UBS, Sony and the Bank of England. While the world is increasingly interlinked in some senses, it remains profoundly fragmented in others.

As organisations become larger and more global than ever before, they are apt to be divided and subdivided into numerous different departments to facilitate productivity. However, there is a trap to the inevitability of these silos. The tunnel vision and tribalism that silos can lead to makes groups less innovative and can lead to disastrous mistakes.

Institutions worldwide are made up of silos operating in isolation from one another. The Silo Effect is an eye-opening account that takes a radical anthropological approach in suggesting how we might draw them back together.

Gillian Tett is assistant editor for the Financial Times, where she has worked for 15 years. In 2008 she won the British Press Award for the Financial Journalist of the Year. She often appears on programmes such as Today and Newsnight and lectures widely.

Listening Length

9 hours and 59 minutes
Author

Gillian Tett
Narrator

Eilidh L. Beaton
Audible release date

27 August 2015
Language

English
Publisher

Audible Studios
ASIN

B07D7ZMWN3
Version

Unabridged
Program Type

Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length	9 hours and 59 minutes
Author	Gillian Tett
Narrator	Eilidh L. Beaton
Audible.in Release Date	27 August 2015
Publisher	Audible Studios
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B07D7ZMWN3
Best Sellers Rank	#15,895 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #60 in Economic Theory (Audible Books & Originals) #146 in Organisational Behaviour #191 in Sociology (Audible Books & Originals)

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5

225 global ratings

5 star		50%
4 star		30%
3 star		14%
2 star		2%
1 star		4%

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Top reviews from India

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Amazon Customer

I lost my first copy while travelling to Mumbai. ...

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on 23 December 2015

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I lost my first copy while travelling to Mumbai. I really wanted to keep a copy and therefore ordered online thru Amazon.

It is a must for understanding sustainability and improving collaboration.

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Bernard E

Great Product

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on 1 May 2019

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Value for money. Will surely recommend.

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Mohit Joshi

Awesome book !!

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on 5 June 2019

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A must read...

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Dev Prasad Panigrahi

Over Priced

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on 10 May 2021

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Charge three time more then the actual price, No MRP printed on book

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Harsh V Chopra

Four Stars

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on 21 March 2016

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Good. Satisfied.

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jagdish Choudhry,

Worth reading many times -

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on 21 September 2015

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It is a wonderful book -

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tushar

Fresh!

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on 8 September 2017

Gillian has used some very authentic examples to prove her point around the perils of using rigid taxonomy to classify our world.. good read if you are looking for something fresh.

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Praphull Jha

Must read for every change management leaders.

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on 6 September 2022

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Must read for every change management leaders.

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Top reviews from other countries

Hande Z

Blinkers off

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 10 September 2015

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This is an interesting book about the dangers of specialisation. The most common problem of specialisation is that it causes ‘tunnel vision’, a phenomenon in which the specialist sees all problems in the context of his specialisation. When a cardiologist sees a person collapsing and thinks straightaway that it was due to a cardiac arrest – that’s an example of the silo effect.

The related point is that specialists tend not to see the big picture. They tend not to discuss with people outside their specialisation and thus remain limited in their approach to problems. Using a number of real stories, Tett shows how we can overcome the silo effect. She also relates the converse – namely with the story of the BlueMoutain Capital, a hedge fund, she shows how the fund took advantage of the silo effect to make big profits. It is a direct contrast to the massive failure of the UBS bank during the financial crisis. It is a fascinating story of how a big institution (JP Morgan) did not know what its ultra-specialist unit (known as the ‘Chief Investment Office’) was doing – it was trading in an ultra-specilised product known as IG9. Few outside the banking circle knew about IG9. Not many in JP Morgan did either. BlueMountain Capital studied the trends and discrepancies (a complicated description but lucidly explained by Tett) and took the opposite positions from JP Morgan’s CIO unit.

There is also the fascinating story about Brett Goldstein, the man who created OpenTable to help well-to-do people book restaurant seats. On 11 September 2001 Goldstein began to see a bigger picture of his own life and he ended up working with Jody Weiss, the newly appointed police superintendent of the Chicago Police. Tett shows that silos can be found in the unlikeliest places – the police forces, FBI and other intelligence agencies. Goldstein and Weiss worked to crack the silos in the Chicago Police force.

The book may seem a little longwinded because Tett takes a bit too long to tell her many stories that cover just a couple of major points, but the events are complicated and the reader’s patience will be rewarded.

17 people found this helpful

William Jordan

Case studies in silos and how to avoid them

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 4 December 2015

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The concept is that organisations that work in silos and think in silos do less well in life than those that don't - and also that antholopology can help us see and overcome the silos in which we think and live.

This central thesis is illustrated by a series of stories. Quite a few are drawn from the author's work on the financial crisis and the moral tends to be 'if you just looked at the world on a silo basis you would not know that there was anything wrong'. But the book ranges wider. You could be the head of Sony, realise it worked on a silo basis and that this wasn't helping it, but still be unable to prevent things going wrong there as competition between silos rather than with external competitors, took hold.There are stories of overcoming silos and bringing together data from many sources to gain an understanding of the world that is not available in silos (in targeting fire risks in New York; or reducing crime in Chicago). Or in running a successful organisation like Facebook that has built in silo-avoiding processes and structures in its organisation as it has grown.

The book is easy to read, but I would have like to see more follow-through on the anthropology theme. The chapter telling me what anthropologists did I found interesting, and learned quite a lot from. But I wasn't sure I really understood how far the other stories in the book were really governed by the anthropological interests and knowledge of the author.

5 people found this helpful

20:20

A Great Primer

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 10 October 2015

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Having pre-ordered the book ahead of publication and having waited for three years for the book to come out I confess I really was hoping for rather more. Sorry Gillian, I say this despite following your columns with huge interest and respect.

The stories that are told are fascinating and show excellent examples of silo busting but...

What are the best offered solutions that come out though? We have: 'bring the data together, think, and use imagination'. Fine. Also six reasonable lessons. All of which are perfectly valid – so far as they go....

But are there really no more effective possible solutions? (and if not now, then in the future?) or was a deeper inquiry into possible future solutions too much to hope for?

For instance, there seems to be a missing chapter on how the internet could help overarch silos – as it surely will at some point? The net is far more than a source of information. Its greatest effect is as a network: what was dubbed initially the 'new economy' is now the 'network economy'. So where are the comments, not so much about current social media – a lot of which will drastically change soon as it steadily becomes easier to have trustless peer-to-peer contact – but about future networking opportunities which will help shape good silos and minimize bad ones?

I was also somewhat saddened that the book seemed to be so business school and American oriented. I guess this was on publishers' advice to meet greater sales prospects.

I had hoped it would be wider in vision, and have more on other non-business areas, for example, in the field of defence.

For instance, former US General Stanley McChrystal achieved an outstanding success with a networking strategy in Iraq – as he said, "It takes a network to defeat a network" – and set an incredible precedent in the field of contemporary security issues where he demolished (US military) silos comprehensively to brilliant effect and won a highly successful military victory (I make no comment about the wider campaign strategies and political angles).

And elsewhere, in the UK (after all, the author's home country) where huge silos in the armed forces are having to be demolished also, in order to meet as effectively possible the biggest security threat of our time, in the form of ISIS.

Nor is the general reader helped by such longwinded words as ‘taxonomies’ (new to me – and hardly the way to get the message across to those who need to read the book most) nor British readers’ blood pressure helped by phrases like ‘multiple times’ (ugh!) in lieu of the simpler ‘frequently’?

For all the negatives, this book has nonetheless shone a brilliant searchlight on the whole problem of silos and how we all need to become much more aware of them in a whole range of different organisations, and so the author is to be congratulated.

But I sense this is work in progress for her and hope very much that now she has got the subject on the operating table she will continue to dissect and tell us much more about bad practices, good practices, successful solutions and less successful ones in due course, perhaps if and when she ever has more time – and if, with any luck, she ever returns to the UK. I shall look forward to further updates.

15 people found this helpful

Martin @B2BTechMark

A good introduction to the dangers of siloes

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 1 May 2019

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On the whole, this is a good book. Worthwhile reading. It will open you eyes to the unseen siloes around you.

However, the penultimate chapter seems to degenerate into an lengthy and incongruous technical description of the goings-on within a financial environment. Clearly, this reflects Gillian's strong financial background, but I feel that this would benefit from some heavy editing to make it as easily-consumable as the rest of the book. It's probably of great interest if you work in the financial sector, but less relevant to those who do not.

It would be nice to have seen some specific takeaways on the easily-to-spot attributes of silo dangers, and some how-to insight on how to successfully bucket-bust.

Otherwise, a great, eye-opening book that will have you spotting siloes everywhere you look.

Sam

Great book, some complicated words...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 20 October 2015

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Very good book. Useful to understand the silo concept and break it down. Now I'm seeing the problems of silos even in my children's school. The pattern is everywhere. I put 4 stars because she uses a lot of "showing off words" that are unnecessary. She doesn't need to demonstrate anything, the same ideas could have been put in plain english.

One person found this helpful

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