たこつぼ

The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers (English Edition)

“Sony is a company with too many silos!” he declared. Silos? Japanese listeners were baffled. The American word for “silo,” or sairo as the Japanese pronounced it, was unknown in Japan, since the country grew rice, not grain. Indeed, the word was so unfamiliar that, in desperation, the translator turned the phrase into takotsubo or “octopus pot.”

Silo とは「たこつぼ」みたいなもの。

The modern world needs silos, at least if you interpret that word to mean specialist departments, teams, and places. The reason is obvious: we live in such a complex world that humans need to create some structure to handle this complexity.

Silo は複雑な問題を解決するための専門家の集団であり、これは必要悪である。

But silos can also sometimes cause damage. People who are organized into specialist teams can end up fighting with each other, wasting resources. Isolated departments, or teams of experts, may fail to communicate, and thus overlook dangerous and costly risks. Fragmentation can create information bottlenecks and stifle innovation.

ソニーのデジタル・ウオークマンよりアップルの iPod が売れたのは、ソニーがそのころ独立採算制の専門家集団だった、つまり、たこつぼの集まりだったから？（オレの愛したソニー：日経ビジネスオンライン）

Why Sony unveiled not one, but two different digital Walkman devices in 1999 was because it was completely fragmented.

たこつぼはマイクロソフトやゼロックスにもある。

Microsoft was one company that was renowned for silos, as was Xerox.

“It’s been an issue for us,” said Satya Nadella, a long-serving Microsoft executive who was appointed CEO in 2014.

本書ではフェイスブックが、ひとつの成功例として取り上げられている。

“We want to be the anti-Sony, the anti-Microsoft—we look at companies like that and see what we don’t want to become.” —Senior Facebook executive

フェイスブックはまだ成長期にあった時に、たこつぼをつくらないように工夫したということで、これが例えばソニーにできてしまった、たこつぼを壊すことに使えるのかと考えると少々疑問が残る。

When Facebook conducted a successful IPO in late 2013, which valued the company at an eye-popping $100 billion, this expansion seemed to increase, not decrease, the unease.

人の問題と組織の問題。

People need to be mixed together to stop them becoming inward-looking and defensive. Organizations need to think about pay and incentives.

When employees are rewarded purely on the basis of how their group performs, and when groups are competing with each other internally, they are unlikely to collaborate—no matter how many expensive off-sites an institution holds, or open plan offices it creates.

フェイスブックの事例では組織としての人事評価、報奨にどのような工夫があったかについては本書にあまり記述はない。

成功の要因のひとつはフェイスブックで働くエンジニアがみんな似通っていたから。

One notable feature of Facebook was that its employees were homogenous. The engineers were mostly trained in the same set of computer skills and were in their twenties or early thirties. Most wore a common “uniform,” sneakers and jeans, and had a similar outlook on life. That made it easier to foster a common group identity and break down silos inside the company.

フェイスブックのやり方の真価が問われるのはむしろ、これからとも思われる。

これと対比して興味深いのは、Cleveland Clinic の事例。内科と外科という区別を廃止し病名や体の部位名を使って病院を27の新しい部門に再編した。

On January 1, 2008, Cleveland announced its “Big Bang” revolution: twenty-seven new “institutes” were created with labels such as “Dermatology and Plastic Surgery Institute,” “Digestive Disease Institute,” “Urological and Kidney Institute,” Head and Neck Institute,” “Heart and Vascular Institute,” “Cancer Institute.”

総合病院に勤める医者や看護師の専門性はフェイスブックのエンジニアより多様であるのは明らか。でも再編と言っても２つのチームをただ同じ場所に移動するだけという簡単なケースもあったという。

In some sections, the reforms involved nothing more than moving teams into new, joint offices.

この病院では再編の以前にすでに医者の給料は固定年棒制となっており、これも再編成功のひとつの要因である。

Cleveland Clinic doctors got paid a fixed salary, rather than earning fees on the basis of each separate procedure.

本書では、culture という言葉と anthropology という言葉が多く使われている。このふたつをつなげると、文化人類学。

成長企業が革新を続けるためのヒントは文化人類学を学ぶことにある？

“I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game. It is the game.” —Lou Gerstner, former CEO of IBM

You do not need to be an anthropologist to get that insider-outsider view.

Instead anthropology is best viewed as a mind-set, or a way of looking on the world.

著者は、人類学者のマインド・セットと以下の６つの行動原理を持つことで、たこつぼに入り込むのを防ぐことができると説く。

外に出る - They usually get out of their offices and experience life on the ground, trying to understand micro-level patterns to make sense of the macro picture.

見聞を広げる - They listen and look with an open mind and try to see how all the different pieces of a social group or system interconnect.

言い難いこと、興味のないことにも目を向ける - They end up examining the parts of life that people do not want to talk about, because they are considered taboo, dull, or boring.

注意深く聞く、実際の行動との違いを理解する - They listen carefully to what people say about their life, and then compare it to what people actually do.

社会、文化の違いのパターンを知る - Anthropologists often compare different societies and cultures and systems. A key reason they do this is because comparison can help illuminate the underlying patterns of different social groups.

文化を変えることもできる - Anthropologists know that the classification systems we use to organize our worlds and minds are not inevitable; they are usually a function of nurture not nature. We can change our cultural patterns if we really want to do that.