Anyone who has attempted to implement lean saving discovers that most companies operate inside little silos. The marketing department does not think that they need to link their actions to sales generated or prospects discovered. The engineering / product planning group believes that someone else should define the detail specs for the new product to be developed. The accounting group wants perfect projection of all future expenditures. The sales group wishes that the custom offerings desired by each customer can be delivered in the same time and same price as the standardized offering. We have all been around this merry-go round.

I started to wonder how we evolved to work in silos. I suspect that our upbringing is a factor. Our parents created a sheltered cocoon so that we could grow to the point that we could face all the challenges ourselves. Many of us first experienced swimming in the safety of a wading pool in our back yards.

A few of the high filers grew to revel in surfing the earthquake waves of the oceans. The work environment throws major challenges at us. I believe that silos have been created as a partial replacement for the cocoons that sheltered us in childhood.

There are high fliers in the business arena as well. In the successful start-up companies they are able to navigate in company size silos. Companies like GE have discovered that grouping high fliers into their own start-up silo is a effective formula to kick-start innovation. I am not sure whether the silo created for this purpose was an invention of the rest of the GE players. The jury is still out on whether it is possible to attract and retain a group of players who are comfortable in working in a company size silo. We will all be watching the Zappos experiment in holocracy