Waterstones The Silo Effect
211 ratings
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Price: £9.99
Brand: Waterstones
Description: Ever since civilised society began, we have felt the need to classify, categorise and specialise. It can make things more efficient, and help give the leaders of any organisation a sense of confidence that they have the right people focusing on the right tasks. But it can also be catastrophic, leading to tunnel vision and tribalism. Most importantly it can create a structural fog, with the full picture of where an organisation is heading hidden from view. It is incredibly widespread: the chances are these 'silos' are rife in any organisation or profession, whether your business, or your local school or hospital. Across industries and cultures, as this brilliant and penetrating book shows, silos have the power to collapse companies and destabilise financial markets, yet they still dominate the workplace. They blind and confuse us, often making modern institutions act in risky, silly and damaging ways. Gillian Tett has spent years covering financial markets and business, but she's also a trained anthropologist, having completed a doctorate at Cambridge University and conducted field work in Tibet and Tajikistan. She's no stranger to questioning the assumptions and practices of a culture. Those in question - financial trading desks, urban police forces, surgical teams within medical clinics, software debuggers and consumer product engineers - have practices and rituals as ordered and intricate as those of any far-flung tribe. In The Silo Effect, she uses an anthropological lens to explore how individuals, teams and whole organisations often work in silos of thought, process and product. With examples drawn from a range of fascinating areas - the New York Fire Department and Facebook to the Bank of England and Sony - these narratives illustrate not just how foolishly people can behave when they are mastered by silos but also how the brightest institutions and individuals can master them. The Silo Effect is a sharp, visionary and inspiring work with the insight, prescriptions and power to remove our organisational blinders and transform the way we think for the better.
Category: Books
Merchant: Waterstones
Product ID: 9781844087594
Delivery cost: 2.99
ISBN: 9781844087594
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Author: Dr Mike
Rating: 5
Review: The author is a regular columnist in the Financial Times and the book was duly 'trailed' in the Weekend Magazine. The book exactly meets the expectations raised by that article. It is an Anthropologist's examination of a set of modern cultures: the Corporation. Deeply anecdotal, it confirms everything I have thought about businesses from the cross-section of them in which I have worked: the bigger they get, the greater the inefficiencies of scale. Whether the new Internet-based businesses can overcome this is still not clear. The anecdotes about Facebook suggest that there is some hope but I can still see the seeds of inefficiency sprouting even there.
Author: tallmanbaby
Rating: 3
Review: This idea of a management book on the perils of organisations being arranged in rigid silos is not immediately inspiring, it could be filed alongside the travel book on the arctic being cold and the history book on Hitler not perhaps being the nicest person that ever lived. However Gillian Tett writes well and has some interesting points to make. I seem to be reading a lot of books by anthropologists about subjects other than anthropology these days, and as a former anthropology student Gillian deploys an anthropologist’s eye to good effect. The book is written in the form of a series of good quality (often quite technical) journalistic feature articles. However this is not always enough to sustain interest in the less interesting pieces. There is an introduction on anthropology, case studies on the problems with silos at IBM, UBS, and the recent recession, and examples of silo busting via data analysis, Facebook and social engineering, Cleveland Clinic, and Bluemountain Capital. This is concluded with a helpful summary of the points already made in the previous chapters. The book make a number of interesting, if hardly earth-shattering points. If you do not like financial journalism, then you are likely to find the examples a bit lopsided. My main problem with the book is not that it is is bad, it is well written and largely insightful, but that is still feels like an early draft. The various chapters sit alongside each other, without really informing each other. The points made are often predictable, and often not terribly actionable. Even adopting the anthropological perspective seems to promise more than it actually delivers. In practical terms if you want to spend your professional life questioning everyone’s fundamental assumptions, then you are likely to face an uphill struggle, or a quick exit. This is a provocative book, but ultimately it fails to fully live up to the challenges that it sets itself.
