IDEA CONTAGION
What our top innovators know about human creativity
Whatever happened to Sony? Once as cool and innovative as Apple and Google, Sony now ranks as No. 478 on the Forbes list of the world’s 2,000 largest public companies. If you heard someone describe himself as “a Sony kind of person,” you’d assume he was kidding or had just arrived from 1981 in a time machine.
Gillian Tett suggests a oneword answer to the Sony problem: silos. By the 1990s, Sony had become a warren of bureaucracies, each competing with the others and jealous of expertise. Each was effectively a separate silo, a huge stack of talent cut off from the others.
In 1999, Sony developed, with great fanfare, what it hoped would be the portable music player of its era, a successor to the company’s ubiquitous Walkman players of the 1980s. On a November day in Las Vegas, Sony rolled out its digital Walkman: the “Memory Stick Walkman.”
ThenCEO Nobuyuki Idei introduced a second, similar device: the Vaio MusicClip, an audio player developed by a separate team. The two gadgets were incompatible.
Not long after that, Sony pitched a third device, the “Network Walkman,” which wasn’t integrated with the other two.
By the time Idei was replaced with the first nonJapanese leader in the company’s history, Howard Stringer, an executive named Rob Wiesenthal complained to reporters, “I have 35 Sony devices at home. I have 35 battery chargers. That’s all you need to know.”
Stringer tried to get the various departments to stop fighting one another. But the Japanese had never heard of silos, and they weren’t interested in Stringer’s ideas about knocking down barriers between units. When he tried to steer the company toward an ereader, managers didn’t want to share ideas or input with one another or with the book industry. The device foundered.
Stringer lasted seven years, with Sony posting a record loss in 2012 — the year he was ousted.
“Silo” has become a cliche among management consultants — and executives trying to hang onto their jobs by speaking the language of the au courant — but Tett gives the metaphor life in her engaging, casestudyfilled new book “The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers.”
Tett, a longtime Financial Times columnist and US managing editor for the paper, brings to her study of organizational cacophony (and harmony) another tool: She is a trained anthro pologist with a Ph.D. in the subject from Cambridge University.
Silos tend to form naturally in a contemporary workplace sue to specialization. Just as a shortstop would be baffled if you told him to pitch, teammates have very different types of expertise, even within a firm whose employees broadly share the same goal.
Facebook, Tett explains, is a company engineered with the silo problem in mind. If companies beset by silos are characterized by topdown decisionmaking and little communication between sectors, Facebook is organized as a silobuster.
For instance, groups of new employees, regardless of rank or speciality, are assigned to take a workplaceculture course of training called “bootcamp.” Relationships formed during the sixweek period tend to be lasting and provide natural connections between the different units that bootcampers go on to join.
Another Facebook innovation is a rotation program called “hackamonth,” a break from routine that shuttles engineers into new projects for a few months. It tends to be a boost for morale and gives talented (but potentially bored) people new challenges. It also provides a continuous source of outsider thinking to prevent project development from becoming sclerotic and resistant to innovation.
To nurture horizontal communication instead of topdown direction, Facebook has also literally torn down walls (in its openplan headquarters, formerly a warren of small offices) and built bridges (connecting higher floors of neighboring buildings on the corporate campus).
Facebook is a blooming garden of crosspollination where employees think of the company as “a single, open mass, where everyone could — and should — collide with everyone else, in a freewheeling, irreverent way,” Tett writes.
But it isn’t just corporations that can benefit from tearing down silos or preventing them from forming. Former Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s City Hall, Tett explains, was at a loss to predict where dangerous fires were likely to occur until a data specialist named Mike Flowers dove into the separate information silos of the Fire, Building, Finance and Investigations departments.
He produced a statistical model that identified buildings with a high likelihood of being firetraps. Building inspectors in the field found serious problems in 70 percent of the structures identified by the model, whereas random inspections found problems only 13 percent of the time.
Fundamentally, silobusting is about widening your scope, exchanging tunnel vision for the big picture. Flowers might have been speaking for any large or complex organization when he said, “Everything here is arranged in a fragmented way. It’s tough to join it all up. When you do, it’s obvious that you get much better outcomes.”