Book Review: The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers
The “Silo Effect” is one of the phases of business growth. When a business is small, maybe just a few employees, the content of the work is not very classified. “Silo Effect” will not happen in this phase. However, when the business continuous growth up, more employees join the team and the “group” employees try more effectively the work. The “Silo Effect” side effect maybe happen in silence.
As this book mentions in section 1, the “Silo Effect” happens even though no one can easily recognize it until business or economy goes downhill. It is more like human nature. “Grouping” is a way that improves effective work but it also needs to control well to avoid the “Silo Effect” happening.
Section 2 of the book, it is talking about how to break the “Silo Effect”. The most important in my point of view is from “everyone ownself”. The mindset needs to be implanted first. After this, the people will quite aggressively break through the “Silo Effect”. Even they will not recognize they are doing the correct thing for avoiding it. If you are a basic staff, you may try to use your expertise to help others. If you are a manager, you may organize a better way to avoid the team “Silo Effect”. If you are a CEO, even you can change whole the culture of the organization. Brett Goldstein use his own ability to try to change the culture police department. Although it cannot continue in the end, however, this seed growing up in other places. Facebook, start from the very beginning. Building, employee training, and social activity are all methods to avoid the “Silo Effect”. Cleveland Clinic hospital even changes its payroll system and then move forward to break the boundary of different departments.
There have several ways to avoid the “Silo Effect” that address in the book. The key point from my point of view is “Communication”. It can help with information transformation, idea transformation, as well as knowledge transformation. There are quite a lot of issues is coming from lack of communication. From organization to personal, “communication” is always the first step to solving the problem. “Open mind” is another point that can help in the “Silo Effect”. If members in the organization can keep an “Open mind” to listen and share what think of their minds, the mindsets will be total different. it will easily prevent the “Silo Effect” in deep.
The end of the book mention, that efficiency is the curse of “Silo Effect”. In order to have efficiency, an organization very easy to separates people into different teams. Somehow, those groups will also be a kind of “Silo”. We must keep the “Silo door” always open so that it can have efficiency and does not fall into the trap of "Silo".
