Employees are becoming so incredibly fragmented inside many large organizations that the right hand often has no idea what the left hand is doing, said Gillian Tett, author of The Silo Effect. ‘Most silos exist because people don’t even think about the way they classify and organize the world,’ said Tett. ‘We’ve become creatures of our own environment and the problem with that is that you end up both risking big dangers because of tunnel vision, but also missing big opportunities too.’ Tett is the managing editor and columnist at the Financial Times. In order to write The Silo Effect, Tett embedded herself within a number of organizations ranging from UBS (UBS) to the Chicago Police Department. She also visited Facebook (FB), a company she said is well aware of the dangers of silos. ‘They have actively tried to overcome the problems of silos and to avoid the dangers that beset a company like Microsoft by looking at how they organize themselves internally and above all else getting employees to think about the silo effect,’ said Tett. Tett said the world’s largest banks suffer perhaps more than any other sector from an entrenched silo effect. In fact, she blamed the financial crisis on ‘the small group of people who are incentivized to really only care about what that small group is doing’ and who pay no attention to what is happening in the rest of the firm.
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