The Silo Effect

Journalist Gillian Tett brings her background as an anthropologist, and her reporting on the 2008 financial crisis, to a basic puzzle: why people in modern institutions sometimes act collectively in ways that seem stupid, and why clever people miss risks and opportunities that later look obvious. Her answer centers on silos, the functional departments organizations divide themselves into. Tett tells eight stories of the syndrome, set at UBS in Switzerland, Sony in Tokyo, the Chicago police, the Bank of England, Cleveland Clinic, Facebook, the BlueMountain hedge fund and Bloomberg's City Hall in New York. Some show how foolishly people can behave once silos master them; others how people and institutions can take charge of them instead.

Indra Nooyi named it on Twitter as one of two books she was reading, alongside Unfinished Business, and urged her followers to read both.