Gillian Tett > 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“To him, bankers were neither noble or Masters of the Universe. They were just businesspeople doing a job, pushing money around the economy as efficiently and effectively as they could.”
― Gillian Tett, Fool's Gold

“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

“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

“If you could really insure banks and other lenders against default risk, that might well unleash a great wave of capital into the economy.”
― Gillian Tett, Fool's Gold

“As with all derivatives, these tools were to offer a way of controlling risk, but they could also amplify it.”
― Gillian Tett, Fool's Gold

“a compartmentalized mental, cultural, and spatial framework that appeared to be widespread.”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“Cultural patterns in the media mattered too.”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“None of the women in the women were eating in the daytime, unless they were pregnant or working, because they were observing the Muslim fast.”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“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

“Tunnel vision is deadly. We need lateral vision. That is what anthropology can impart: anthro-vision.”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“It was surprisingly hard for insiders to draw this “map” of all the financial flows that shaped the City. They could see pieces of this picture. There was excellent data about equity listings, say. But none of the people working in private sector banks or government institutions could offer an easy-to-follow idiot’s guide to show how all these flows interacted.”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“wherever you sit, in whatever blend of familiar and strange, it always pays to stop and ask yourself a simple question that the bankers on the Riviera were not asking: If I was to arrive in this culture, as a total stranger, or as a Martian or child, what might I see?”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“Back in 1933, during the height of the populist backlash against Wall Street, the son of J. Pierpont Morgan—J. P. “Jack” Morgan, Jr.—had been grilled by Congress about his ethos. He declared that the aim of his bank was to conduct “first-class business…in a first-class way.” Fifty years later, that mantra of Jack Morgan struck much of the banking world as quaint. Years of bold innovation had made high-risk trading and aggressive deal making the gold standard of the street, and a “kill or be killed” ethic prevailed. At”
― Gillian Tett, Fool's Gold

“But it was hard to find these: few of the human financiers involved in debt, derivatives, or securitization world wanted to be quoted or photographed, and it was almost impossible to see the human borrowers at the end of the complex financial chains.”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“During the next eight years Bell lived in an Aboriginal community of about six hundred people near Alice Springs.I “I dropped out of school, stopped wearing shoes, and went hunting with people every chance I got,” she said. She learned to extract water from desert frogs and snacked on “witchetty grubs,” a type of Australian caterpillar that lives among tree roots. “I was very fortunate. I had the most blessed childhood.”2”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“Human diversity makes tolerance more than a virtue; it makes it a requirement for survival.” —René Dubos”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“With people dying outside on the streets of Dushanbe, studying marriage rituals did sound exotic—if not irrelevant.”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“If defaults on mortgages were uncorrelated, then the BISTRO structure should be safe for mortgage risk, but if they were highly correlated, it might be catastrophically dangerous. Nobody could know. Duhon”
― Gillian Tett, Fool's Gold

“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

“The revolutions in Big Data and cyberspace give social and computer scientists powerful new tools to watch people. But they also show why Big Data alone cannot explain the world. There is a desperate need to combine social and data science, and a dire shortage of people who can do this. That creates opportunities that anthropologists should grab. In a globalized world where semiotic codes keep changing we should value people who can navigate different cultures in the real world and cyberspace. And as contagion risks arise, policy makers, businesses, and nongovernmental groups need people who have the imagination to see dangers in a holistic way, be that in relation to pandemics, nuclear threats, the environment, or something similar. In short, the world would benefit if there were more anthropologists who can blend their perspectives with other disciplines such as computing, medicine, finance, law, and much else, or inject their vision into policy making.”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“the workers were careful when handling oil drums marked as “full.” However, workers happily smoked in rooms that stored drums marked “empty.” The reason? The word “empty” in English is associated with “nothing”; it seems boring, dull, and easy to ignore. However, “empty” oil drums are actually full of flammable fumes.”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“the need to make the “strange familiar,” to make the “familiar strange,” and listen to social silence.”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life