Amazon.in:Customer reviews: The Silo Effect: Why putting everything in its place isn't such a bright idea

Top positive review

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

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on 23 December 2015

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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Dev Prasad Panigrahi

Over Priced

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on 10 May 2021

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

207 total ratings, 37 with reviews

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From India

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

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on 23 December 2015

Verified Purchase

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

Verified Purchase

Value for money. Will surely recommend.

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Mohit Joshi

Awesome book !!

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on 5 June 2019

A must read...

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on 10 May 2021

Verified Purchase

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

Verified Purchase

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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From other countries

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.

14 people found this helpful

Hande Z

Blinkers off

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 10 September 2015

Verified Purchase

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.

16 people found this helpful

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