Gillian Tett – författare

''A truly gripping narrative . . . The fact that Tett is able to reproduce such raw private communications is a tribute to her journalistic abilities'' Dominic Lawson, Sunday Times''Her blow-by-blow story is an impressive piece of detective work. She pulls back the curtain on a closed, unaccountable world of finance'' Will Hutton, GuardianIn the mid 1990s, at a vast hotel complex on a private Florida beach, dozens of bankers from JP Morgan gathered for what was to become a legendary off-site meeting. It was a wild weekend. But among the drinking, nightclubbing and fist-fights lay a more serious purpose - to assess the possibility of building a business around the new-fangled concepts of credit derivatives.The group at the heart of this revolution was an intense team, made up of individuals with a supreme sense of loyalty to each other and to the bank - for years, nothing could break them apart. But when, finally, the team dispersed, the innovations spread far beyond their original intentions, producing perversions in the mortgage market that ultimately culminated in disaster. Part real-life thriller, part investigation and exposé, this searing narrative takes us deep inside the shadowy world of complex finance - a perfect storm for the credit crunch

Ever since civilised society began, we have felt the need to classify, categorise and specialise. It can make things more efficient, and help give the leaders of any organisation a sense of confidence that they have the right people focusing on the right tasks. But it can also be catastrophic, leading to tunnel vision and tribalism. Most importantly it can create a structural fog, with the full picture of where an organisation is heading hidden from view. It is incredibly widespread: the chances are these ''silos'' are rife in any organisation or profession, whether your business, or your local school or hospital.

Across industries and cultures, as this brilliant and penetrating book shows, silos have the power to collapse companies and destabilise financial markets, yet they still dominate the workplace. They blind and confuse us, often making modern institutions act in risky, silly and damaging ways.

Gillian Tett has spent years covering financial markets and business, but she''s also a trained anthropologist, having completed a doctorate at Cambridge University and conducted field work in Tibet and Tajikistan. She''s no stranger to questioning the assumptions and practices of a culture. Those in question - financial trading desks, urban police forces, surgical teams within medical clinics, software debuggers and consumer product engineers - have practices and rituals as ordered and intricate as those of any far-flung tribe.

In The Silo Effect, she uses an anthropological lens to explore how individuals, teams and whole organisations often work in silos of thought, process and product. With examples drawn from a range of fascinating areas - the New York Fire Department and Facebook to the Bank of England and Sony - these narratives illustrate not just how foolishly people can behave when they are mastered by silos but also how the brightest institutions and individuals can master them. The Silo Effect is a sharp, visionary and inspiring work with the insight, prescriptions and power to remove our organisational blinders and transform the way we think for the better.

Brought to you by Penguin. From the bestselling author of Fool''s GoldTo understand business, you need to think like an anthropologist.Is your workplace riven by tribal conflict? Are your meetings governed by dozens of unspoken rituals? Is there something faintly religious about the way your colleagues worship the CEO?If so, then you might need a lesson in business anthropology. For a century, anthropologists have had an unusual method: immersing themselves deep inside ''alien'' tribes and uncovering, from the inside, how they tick. Today, a new generation of anthropologists are using this approach to explain modern businesses - revealing the hidden rituals that define what we buy, who we sell to, and how we work.Now, bestselling author Gillian Tett reveals how this new wave of anthropology can help make sense of your business. She shows how thinking like an anthropologist can help you navigate a globalised economy, allowing you to get inside the heads of consumers on the other side of the world. And she argues that anthropology can explain your own workplace, too: by revealing why, say, your IT team seem to have such different priorities to you - or how to alter the behavioural patterns of your most perplexing colleagues.Along the way, Tett draws on extraordinary stories from Tajik villages and Amazon warehouses, Japanese classrooms and Wall Street trading floors - all to reveal how you too can think like an anthropologist.The result is a revelatory new way to view global business. In a short-sighted world, we can all learn to see clearly - using the power of Anthro-Vision.© Gillian Tett 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021