CM 019: Gillian Tett on Breaking Down Silos - a podcast by Gayle Allen

When we operate in silos, we narrow our perspective in ways that can limit, and even destroy, innovation. So where have we seen silos before and what can we learn from them?

In this fascinating conversation with Gillian Tett, award-winning journalist and U.S. Managing Editor of the Financial Times, she explains how silos reversed decades of innovation at Sony, limited innovation in a world-class hospital, and played a key role in the 2007 global financial crisis. Drawing on insights from her bestselling book, The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers, she helps us see the patterns that create these tendencies, and the simple steps we can take to avoid or overcome them.In this episode you will learn:

what makes smart people do apparently stupid thingshow rewards and incentives can reinforce a silo mentality
why success can lead to silo perspectivessteps we can take to overcome mental and organizational silos
the value of an insider-outsider perspectiveAlso in this interview, Gillian encourages us to recognize how the silos begin erected in the information technology industry have begun to mirror those that led to the 2007 global financial crisis.

She is the other of two other bestselling books, Saving the Sun and Fools Gold.Episode Links

@GillianTettOctopus Pots

British Press AwardsCleveland Clinic

Pierre BourdieuMental Maps

 Securitizations

Sir Paul TuckerPaul McCulley

PIMCOShadow banking

Zoltan PoszarNicolaus Copernicus

Cultural anthropologyBrett Goldstein

Open TableToby Cosgrove

Robin DunbarIt is Complicated by danah boyd

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