Spanning Silos

Chapter 3

Use Teams and Other Routes to Silo Linking

Direction is 90 percent casting.

—old Hollywood adage

The team changes every year, but each team member’s three implicit questions for [the coach] remain the same. “Do you care about me? Can I trust you? Are you committed to the success of our team?”

—Lou Holtz, football coach

ONE OF THE MOST famous management dictums, “structure follows strategy,” represented the conclusion of the business historian Alfred Chandler in his 1962 book in which he studied the evolution of the organizational structure of four dominant companies of the first half of the twentieth century: General Motors (GM), DuPont, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and Sears, Roebuck.¹

Business strategy, for many firms, now involves ...