Back to top
Book
The Silo Effect
Article - McKinsey Quarterly
How the Houston Astros are winning through advanced analytics
Take another Five
Subscribe
Sign up for weekly email briefings
from the Five Fifty
Take a fifty-minute deeper dive
Now that you’ve
read the five …
The silo syndrome has a corrosive effect on company performance.
Siloed unsuccessful
Baseball may be a team sport, but the major leagues are rife with silos, says Astros GM Jeff Luhnow.
Siloed sporty
Article - McKinsey Quarterly
How the Houston Astros are winning through advanced analytics
Silos don’t just show up in org charts—they take hold of minds and thinking.
Siloed stupid
A quick briefing in five—
or a fifty-minute deeper dive
Working in silos can cause tunnel vision, tribalism,
and weak corporate performance. What’s a silo-buster
to do?
The silo syndrome
In this edition:
Dive deeper
Culture for a digital age
Article - McKinsey Quarterly
Dive deeper
The Silo Effect
Book
Dive deeper
Back to top
“Silos can create tunnel vision, or mental blindness, which causes people to do stupid things.”
—Gillian Tett, The Silo Effect
You’ve got your player-development silo with all your minor-league teams. . . . You’ve got your scouting department, which is focused on the amateur world. . . . You have your international department, which has a lot of scouting and a little bit of player development. Then you have your pro scouting department. . . . All of these silos are baseball functions.”
“
—Jeff Luhnow, general manager, Houston Astros
As siloed mind-sets and behavior increase, economic performance decreases
–0.44
Correlation
coefficient
Dive deeper
Culture for a digital age
Article - McKinsey Quarterly
Silos busted
CEOs indicate two primary symptoms of silo syndrome: inadequate information and insufficient accountability or coordination on enterprise-wide initiatives. Try these measures to get rid of them.
Get informed
Employees with insight into the context a business competes in are more likely to recognize the threat of disruption or digital opportunities.
Dive deeper
Making collaboration across functions
a reality
Article - McKinsey Quarterly
End to end
In some cases, the best remedy will be a full-scale redesign of your company’s operating model.
Aim for breakthrough performance no individual function can achieve, while making cross-functional teams accountable for reaching it.
Remake end-to-end processes with changes that promote speed, agility, and efficiency.
Emphasize both collaboration and execution while investing in the leadership capabilities that will sustain reform.
Culture for a digital age
Article - McKinsey Quarterly
Making collaboration across functions a reality
Article - McKinsey Quarterly
Get transparent
Switch
Get accountable
Combining customer databases and propensity models across silos creates visibility and centralized access rights.
Rotating executives between siloed functions and business units creates understanding regarding aspirations and capabilities, and strengthens informal networks across boxes on the org chart.
Infusing your small teams with end-to-end ownership and other key elements of agile’s small-teams approach raises accountability.
Siloed stupid
Silos don’t just show up in org charts—they take hold of minds and thinking.
Discover more Five Fifties
