December 15, 2025
December 15, 2025
Beyond silo thinking: How collaboration boosts corporate success
Listen to this article
Whether industrial giant or start-up—companies often contain genuine parallel worlds. Departments optimize their processes in isolation, prioritize internal KPIs, and pass on risks instead of managing them jointly and strategically.
Who hasn’t experienced this? In procurement, the focus is on savings, while in the supply chain, one meeting follows the next to overcome operational bottlenecks caused by inadequate supplier performance.
This picture is representative of many similar scenarios. It is how silos emerge—invisible walls that isolate teams and departments from one another and make collaboration difficult despite shared corporate goals.
Ultimately, all business operations can be reduced to three words: people, product, and profits. People come first. Unless you’ve got a good team, you can’t do much with the other two.
Lee Iacocca, US automotive executive, former CEO of Chrysler Corporation
The result: slow decisions, duplicated work, blocked innovation and, in the end, often dissatisfied customers. Silo thinking is not a question of mindset alone, but frequently a consequence of organizational design, structures, and incentive systems.
Companies that want to be successful need to break down these silos—as current studies and impressive practical examples show.
Out of silo thinking – joining forces for a turnaround: Chrysler and Iacocca’s model for success
The legendary US manager Lee Iacocca took the helm at Chrysler in 1979, when the company was on the verge of insolvency. In 1978, the company posted a loss of around USD 205 million—caused by a recession, a sharp rise in oil prices, and competition from fuel-efficient imported vehicles, mainly from Japan and Germany, which led to overproduction and high inventories of more than 80,000 unsold vehicles.
The starting situation at that time is reminiscent of the challenges companies face today as a result of global crises and rapid market changes. Chrysler employed 170,000 people at the time.
An important first step was Iacocca’s success in securing USD 1.5 billion in government loan guarantees through the Chrysler Corporation Loan Guarantee Act of 1979, signed by President Jimmy Carter. This was one of the largest bailouts of a private company at the time and ensured that Chrysler remained viable.
Through consistent cross-divisional restructuring, closer cooperation between procurement, supply chain, finance, IT, production, and marketing, as well as innovation, Chrysler increased its sales from around USD 17 billion to over USD 30 billion by the mid-1980s.
At the same time, significant cost reductions were realized, including a reduction in total costs from USD 4.5 billion (1979) to around USD 3.1 billion (1982).
By the mid-1980s, Chrysler was able to repay the loans in full and became profitable again—exemplifying the success of Iacocca’s integrative leadership, which overcame silos and connected divisions to save the company and make it future-proof.
Silos as strategic barriers: key findings from the Deloitte Global CPO Survey 2025
The Deloitte Global CPO Survey 2025 identifies silos as a major barrier to value creation and resilience: over 56% of procurement leaders see siloed ways of working and silo thinking as one of the top three barriers. Silos make cross-functional collaboration difficult, increase internal costs, and undermine the resilience of supply chains.
Change requires investment in talent development, effective operating models, and the targeted use of modern technologies such as generative AI, robotic process automation (RPA), and process orchestration. (Source: Deloitte Global CPO Survey 2025—see link at the end of the article.)
Five proven levers for breaking down silos
Form cross-divisional teams: Introduce cross-functional projects to strengthen cooperation and mutual understanding in a binding way.
Define common end-to-end goals: Measure success not in isolation, but along the entire value chain—for genuine shared responsibility.
Use agile methods and digital tools: Accelerate processes and create transparency with Scrum, Kanban, and modern collaboration platforms.
Use technology strategically: Connect people and data efficiently with AI, automation, and process-oriented management.
Redesign leadership: Shape leadership as a network bridge that overcomes silos and enables cross-divisional collaboration.
Silos are structural challenges that must be addressed primarily at management level, but also by all employees—and solved together. This approach is indispensable in highly competitive markets, and it requires courage, conviction, and active, consistent action.
Rely on collaboration between your teams—and secure speed, innovation, and customer satisfaction.
Listen to this article
Whether industrial giant or start-up—companies often contain genuine parallel worlds. Departments optimize their processes in isolation, prioritize internal KPIs, and pass on risks instead of managing them jointly and strategically.
Who hasn’t experienced this? In procurement, the focus is on savings, while in the supply chain, one meeting follows the next to overcome operational bottlenecks caused by inadequate supplier performance.
This picture is representative of many similar scenarios. It is how silos emerge—invisible walls that isolate teams and departments from one another and make collaboration difficult despite shared corporate goals.
Ultimately, all business operations can be reduced to three words: people, product, and profits. People come first. Unless you’ve got a good team, you can’t do much with the other two.
Lee Iacocca, US automotive executive, former CEO of Chrysler Corporation
The result: slow decisions, duplicated work, blocked innovation and, in the end, often dissatisfied customers. Silo thinking is not a question of mindset alone, but frequently a consequence of organizational design, structures, and incentive systems.
Companies that want to be successful need to break down these silos—as current studies and impressive practical examples show.
Out of silo thinking – joining forces for a turnaround: Chrysler and Iacocca’s model for success
The legendary US manager Lee Iacocca took the helm at Chrysler in 1979, when the company was on the verge of insolvency. In 1978, the company posted a loss of around USD 205 million—caused by a recession, a sharp rise in oil prices, and competition from fuel-efficient imported vehicles, mainly from Japan and Germany, which led to overproduction and high inventories of more than 80,000 unsold vehicles.
The starting situation at that time is reminiscent of the challenges companies face today as a result of global crises and rapid market changes. Chrysler employed 170,000 people at the time.
An important first step was Iacocca’s success in securing USD 1.5 billion in government loan guarantees through the Chrysler Corporation Loan Guarantee Act of 1979, signed by President Jimmy Carter. This was one of the largest bailouts of a private company at the time and ensured that Chrysler remained viable.
Through consistent cross-divisional restructuring, closer cooperation between procurement, supply chain, finance, IT, production, and marketing, as well as innovation, Chrysler increased its sales from around USD 17 billion to over USD 30 billion by the mid-1980s.
At the same time, significant cost reductions were realized, including a reduction in total costs from USD 4.5 billion (1979) to around USD 3.1 billion (1982).
By the mid-1980s, Chrysler was able to repay the loans in full and became profitable again—exemplifying the success of Iacocca’s integrative leadership, which overcame silos and connected divisions to save the company and make it future-proof.
Silos as strategic barriers: key findings from the Deloitte Global CPO Survey 2025
The Deloitte Global CPO Survey 2025 identifies silos as a major barrier to value creation and resilience: over 56% of procurement leaders see siloed ways of working and silo thinking as one of the top three barriers. Silos make cross-functional collaboration difficult, increase internal costs, and undermine the resilience of supply chains.
Change requires investment in talent development, effective operating models, and the targeted use of modern technologies such as generative AI, robotic process automation (RPA), and process orchestration. (Source: Deloitte Global CPO Survey 2025—see link at the end of the article.)
Five proven levers for breaking down silos
Form cross-divisional teams: Introduce cross-functional projects to strengthen cooperation and mutual understanding in a binding way.
Define common end-to-end goals: Measure success not in isolation, but along the entire value chain—for genuine shared responsibility.
Use agile methods and digital tools: Accelerate processes and create transparency with Scrum, Kanban, and modern collaboration platforms.
Use technology strategically: Connect people and data efficiently with AI, automation, and process-oriented management.
Redesign leadership: Shape leadership as a network bridge that overcomes silos and enables cross-divisional collaboration.
Silos are structural challenges that must be addressed primarily at management level, but also by all employees—and solved together. This approach is indispensable in highly competitive markets, and it requires courage, conviction, and active, consistent action.
Rely on collaboration between your teams—and secure speed, innovation, and customer satisfaction.
