If
you’ve ever worked for a large organization, you’ve probably had some
version of the following experience: A project you’ve been working on
for months is now going to be canceled because some other part of the
organization was also working on a similar project, and apparently no
one in your department even knew. Or: You find out some crucial piece of
information or equipment you’ve been desperately searching for actually
exists within your company, secretly hoarded by some rival internal
faction that wanted to make sure no one else got to play with their
proverbial toys.
The
experience is so common, there are lots of ways to describe it — the
left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, turf battles — but
the term the financial journalist Gillian Tett chooses in her new book
is “silos.” In the past decade “silo-busting” has become one of those
buzzy management ideas you find everywhere from start-ups to lefty
nonprofits, and in a series of case studies, from the Bank of England to
the Chicago Police Department to Facebook, Tett attempts to show us how
silos can undermine organizations and how they can be overcome.
But
before getting into that, the book begins with an odd and oddly
compelling chapter that serves as a kind of methodological pre-buttal.
Tett, who has a Ph.D. in social anthropology, wants to show her readers
there are other ways of looking at organizations than what they teach at
Wharton.
She
tells the story of the famed sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who was born
to a poor rural family and made it to the École Normale Supérieure.
After serving in the brutal Algerian war, he returned to the village of
his birth as an “insider-outsider” to study its folkways. At a village
dance on a winter night, Bourdieu noticed a group of men, almost all
identically dressed, just watching the action. Bourdieu learned that
these men were considered “unmarriageable.” They were the eldest sons of
farming families, consigned by tradition to tend the farm. In the
1950s, women were seeking men with professions; these once sought-after
farmers were now considered low-status and undesirable. By looking where
the action wasn’t, Bourdieu revealed something profound about what
industrialization was doing to the world of his village. His unique
position and genius allowed him to make visible what was invisible to
those immersed in what Bourdieu called the “habitus” of a given set of
social arrangements.
The
section serves as a kind of Anthropology/Sociology 101 for the
business class traveler: You, my dear C-suite executive, have all kinds
of contingent, even arbitrary category distinctions and ways of ordering
the world that are, in their own way, just as exotic as the way an
Algerian Berber arranges his households. “Many of the really important
patterns we use to classify the world . . . are inherited from our
culture,” Tett writes. “They exist at the borders of conscious thought
and instinct. They seem natural to us, in the same way our culture
appears ‘normal.’ So much so, that we rarely even notice them at all.”
It’s
a promise that the rest of the book doesn’t quite deliver on. For the
next nine chapters, Tett offers what amounts to a somewhat uneven
management book rather than a work of anthropology or sociology. She’s a
first-rate journalist and a good storyteller, but the book suffers from
structural constraints outside her control. Part of the achievement of
Bourdieu and those who have followed his path is their total immersion,
the thousands of hours observing, documenting, living in the world they
are chronicling. That’s not possible for Tett, who’s got a day job, so
the sourcing often feels very thin. She spends a chapter on the
Cleveland Clinic, with 40,000 employees, and never quotes a nurse. Her
chapter on Sony is told almost entirely from the perspective of its
former C.E.O. Howard Stringer, who struggled (and failed) to get Sony to
overcome its silos — or “octopus pots,” the more comprehensible term to
the Japanese. Maybe Stringer’s interpretation of events is accurate,
maybe not, but Tett’s reliance on his point of view is equivalent to
Bourdieu trying to solve the mystery of his village’s unmarried men by
interviewing the local mayor.
The
chapters on organizations trying to break down internal divisions —
Facebook and Cleveland Clinic — are considerably more revealing than
those about the risks posed by overly rigid silos. Tett points to
Facebook’s creation of a boot camp for new hires, which, according to a
Facebook founder, can encourage “cross-team communication and prevent
the silos that so commonly spring up in growing engineering
organizations.”
Of
course, Wall Street banks have boot camps, too, but Facebook takes it
further: There are regular all-night hackathons where engineers work
intensively on coding problems and rotations in which they can leave
their current teams and try something new. Even though that kind of
movement is enormously disruptive, one Facebook employee says it’s worth
the cost: “When people actively choose to do something, they are going
to do better work.” The idea is that if you keep forcing people from
different parts of the organization to collide with and interact with
one another, you’re going to have a smarter organization.
A
similar ethos guides the acclaimed Cleveland Clinic, which was born of
an idiosyncratic partnership and today, in spite of its sprawling size,
delivers some of the best, most economically efficient care anywhere in
the world. In the past decade it has undertaken a huge reorganization
that traded traditional medical specializations for “institutes”
centered around the parts of the body they treat, and the hospital has
risen to the top of the rankings in patient satisfaction.
All
of this is interesting enough, but for a book about “silos,” the
concept itself is not sufficiently defined or theorized. We’re never
given any new language or analytical framework to help us think about
when silos are useful and when they’re not, how to identify them, how we
might sort them into types. We only hear examples of when they’re bad
and when they’ve been transcended or “busted,” in the book’s preferred
lingo.
Part
of the problem is that the core concept itself is so amorphous. “The
word ‘silo’ does not just refer to a physical structure or organization
(such as a department),” Tett writes. “It can also be a state of mind.
Silos exist in structures. But they exist in our minds and social groups
too. Silos breed tribalism. But they also go hand in hand with tunnel
vision.” A concept this expansive makes for a weak mechanism of
explanation; it’s so comprehensive it threatens to bend toward
tautology, like saying “studiousness” makes for a good student.
Since
every organization has them, one can imagine finding some evidence that
silos — again, whatever that means in any given instance — are to blame
in the wake of any particular failure. Looking at the financial crisis,
we see that both the Bank of England and UBS had silos that blinded
them to impending doom. But this was almost certainly true of banks that
overperformed during the credit crisis, like J.P. Morgan, as well. The
haziness surrounding the book’s central concept means that silos can
often feel more like a post-hoc scapegoat for dysfunction than a
predictive indicator of which organizations will succeed.
The
lesson, if there is a broadly applicable one, is that people inside
organizations should do all they can to view their own practices as
contingent, their own categories and tribes as temporary. That’s a
profoundly difficult mental discipline to cultivate, and I’m not quite
sure how this book is going to help you do it.
THE SILO EFFECT
The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers
By Gillian Tett
Source:New York Times.
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