Award-winning journalist Gillian Tett “applies her anthropologist’s lens to the issue of why so many organizations still suffer from a failure to communicate. It’s a serious idea, richly examined” (The Wall Street Journal), about how our tendency to generate practical departments-silos-hinders our function.

The Silo Effect asks a basic question: why do humans working in contemporary institutions collectively act in ways that sometimes seem stupid? Why perform normally smart people fail to discover risks and about The Silo Effect: The Peril of Experience and the Promise of WEARING DOWN Barriers possibilities that later appear blindingly apparent? Why, as Daniel Kahnemann, the psychologist put it, are we occasionally so “blind to your own blindness”?

Gillian Tett, “a first-rate journalist and a good storyteller” (The New York Times), answers these questions by domestic plumbing her background as an anthropologist and her experience reporting for the financial meltdown in 2008. In The Silo Impact, she stocks eight different stories from the silo symptoms, spanning Bloomberg’s Town Hall in NY, the lender of England in London, Cleveland Medical center hospital in Ohio, UBS standard bank in Switzerland, Facebook in San Francisco, Sony in Tokyo, the BlueMountain hedge fund, as well as the Chicago police. Some of these narratives illustrate how foolishly people can behave when they are perfected by silos. Others, however, show how institutions and people can expert their silos rather.

“Highly intelligent, enjoyable, and enlivened with a string of vivid case studies….The Silo Effect is also really important, because Tett’s prescription for curing the pathological silo-isation of business and government is refreshingly unorthodox and, in my own view, convincing” (Financial Instances). This is “a satisfying call to action for better integration within businesses” (Web publishers Weekly).