The Silo Effect Quotes

“Studying anthropology tends t change the way you look at the world. It leaves a distinctive chip in your brain, or lens over your eye. Your mind-set becomes instinctive: wherever you go to work, you start asking questions about how different elements of society interact, looks at the gap between rhetoric and reality, noting the concealed functions of rituals and symbols, and hunting out social silences. Anyone who has been immersed in anthropology is doomed to be an insider-outside for the rest of their life; they can never take anything entirely at face value, but are compelled to constantly ask: why?”
― Gillian Tett, The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers

“silos are fundamentally a cultural phenomenon. They arise because social groups and organizations have particular conventions about how to classify the world.”
― Gillian Tett, The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers

“the word “silo” does not just refer to a physical structure or organization (such as a department). 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 can also go hand in hand with tunnel vision.”
― Gillian Tett, The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers

“Every established order tends to make its own entirely arbitrary system seem entirely natural.” —Pierre Bourdieu1”
― Gillian Tett, The Silo Effect: Why putting everything in its place isn't such a bright idea

“We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.” —Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow”
― Gillian Tett, The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers

“breaking down silos can spark innovation in unexpected ways.”
― Gillian Tett, The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers

“the key point is this: with or without a formal training in anthropology, we all do need to think about the cultural patterns and classification systems that we use. If we do, we can master our silos. If we do not, they will master us.”
― Gillian Tett, The Silo Effect: Why putting everything in its place isn't such a bright idea

“The paradox of the modern age, I realized, is that we live in a world that is closely integrated in some ways, but fragmented in others. Shocks are increasingly contagious. But we continue to behave and think in tiny silos.”
― Gillian Tett, The Silo Effect: Why putting everything in its place isn't such a bright idea

“he analyzed how a mundane action, such as deciding to order bouillabaisse in a restaurant (or not) creates social labels and markers that sort people into different groups.”
― Gillian Tett, The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers

“are culture-vultures; but not in the way this phrase is usually used,” as Stephen Hugh-Jones, a British anthropologist, explains. “For anthropologists ‘culture’ is not a matter of refinement of tastes or the intellectual side of civilization; it is the commonly-held ideas, beliefs and practices of any society of any kind.”
― Gillian Tett, The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers

“Anyone who has been immersed in anthropology is doomed to be an insider-outsider for the rest of their life; they can never take anything entirely at face value, but are compelled to constantly ask: Why?”
― Gillian Tett, The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers

“patterns. This sense of hierarchy and conformity was particularly strong during the militarist period of the 1930s. However, after Japan lost the war in 1945, the country became”
― Gillian Tett, The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers

“• But a fifth key point that is implicit in Bourdieu’s work is that people do not always have to be trapped in the mental maps that they inherit. We are not robots, blindly programmed to behave in certain ways. We can also have some choice about the patterns we use. How much choice humans have to reshape their cultural norms was—and is—an issue of hot dispute. When Bourdieu was first embarking on his academic career, Sartre, the French philosopher, declared that humans did have free will, and could develop their thoughts as they chose. Lévi-Strauss took another view: he thought that humans were doomed to be creatures of their environment, since they could not think out of their inherited cultural patterns. Bourdieu, however, rejected both of these ideas; or, more accurately, he steered a middle ground between these two extremes. He did not think that people are robots, programmed to obey cultural rules automatically. Indeed, he did not like the word “rules” at all, preferring to talk about cultural “habits.” But he also believed these habits and the habitus shaped how people behave and think. Social maps are powerful. But they are not all-powerful. We are creatures of our physical and social environment. However, we need not be blind creatures. Occasionally, individuals can imagine a different way of organizing our world, particularly if they—like Bourdieu—have become an insider-outsider by jumping across boundaries.”
― Gillian Tett, The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers