A meeting. Negotiating a partnership with a publicly listed company, the other side showed up with twelve people seated in a row. A whole table of business cards collected; everyone was very polite during their self-introductions, with titles ranging from manager to vice president.

▶ Listen to summary
AI-synthesized voice, cloned from the author's own voice

After the meeting, I asked my colleague: “So, who today was the person who could make a decision?”

My colleague glanced at me: “Probably… none of them.”

This isn’t an isolated incident. Doing B2B in Taiwan, you encounter this scenario at least once a month. The other side takes your proposal seriously—so they send a lot of people. But many people showing up doesn’t mean things will move forward. The more common outcome is: each department leaves with its own concerns, digests them back inside its own silo, and then at the next meeting a third of the people have changed, and the conversation starts from scratch.

Three months later, apart from going through dozens of business cards and several pots of coffee, there’s been no progress whatsoever.

Division of Labor Isn’t the Problem; the Breakdown Is

Gillian Tett, author of The Silo Effect, uses “silos” as a metaphor for information isolation within an organization. Each department is like an independent silo—the grain (information) inside can neither come in nor go out.

But I want to push her view one step further: the problem isn’t division of labor itself. Division of labor is the foundation of civilization—you can’t expect one person to understand finance, legal, technology, and marketing all at once. The problem is that after division of labor, the channels for information flow get severed.

To put it in more technical language: the organization’s problem is that the interfaces between modules are designed terribly.

Each department has its own language, its own KPIs, its own priorities. The finance department looks at cash flow and risk, the business department looks at revenue and growth, the legal department looks at compliance and liability. They might be discussing the same project, but “is this deal good?” translates completely differently in each department.

When these different translations can’t be integrated into a shared judgment, the organization is paralyzed. Because no one has the ability to translate the language of all departments into a single story.

How I Learned to Recognize Silos

After more than a decade in business development, I’ve developed a quick method for recognizing silos. It’s not any kind of theory—just an intuition that grew out of falling into too many pits.

Scenario One: The big spread of people seated in a row. A dozen-plus people show up for the meeting, with representatives from every department. The more diverse the titles on the business cards, the deeper the silos. Because if internal communication within the organization were smooth, there’d be no need for every department to send someone—one or two people with a holistic view could represent them. People seated in a row means: they can’t sort things out internally either, so they’re making you the catalyst for integration.

The problem is, you’re not their employee—you have no authority to push anything within their organization.

Scenario Two: The point of contact keeps changing. Planning, procurement, contracts—each stage has a different counterpart. You think you’re negotiating a partnership with one company, but you’re actually negotiating separately with three departments that don’t communicate with each other. The most maddening part is that the terms you agreed on with Department A are completely unknown to Department B, and Department C simply vetoes them.

When you run into either of these situations, my advice is: control the time and resources you invest with extreme care. Because it means the other party’s internal communication costs are ten times higher than you imagine, and that cost will ultimately be passed on to you.

The Value of a Translator

So what do you do? Give up? Sometimes yes—giving up is the most rational choice. But if the opportunity is truly worth pursuing, what you need to do isn’t to “sell harder,” but to become a translator.

What does that mean?

It means you have to figure out what each of the other party’s departments cares about, and then, using each of their respective languages, tell the same proposal as different stories. When talking to finance, emphasize ROI and risk control; when talking to technology, emphasize architectural compatibility and maintenance costs; when talking to business, emphasize market opportunity and competitive advantage.

And then—this is the most crucial part—you have to help them integrate these stories into one. Because they can’t do it themselves.

This doesn’t sound like business development work. That’s right—it’s more like consulting work, even like what the project manager inside the other party’s company should be doing. But this is the reality of B2B business development: before you can sell anything, you first have to help the other party’s organization run through a decision-making process.

When I train business teams in my own company, what I emphasize most isn’t sales scripts and presentation skills, but: “Can you draw out the other company’s decision-making map?” Who influences whom? Who has veto power? Whose KPIs are tied to your proposal? If you can’t draw that map, no matter how good the product, you can’t push it through.

You Have to Transcend the Organization to Break the Organization

There’s a paradox here: to break someone else’s silo, you can’t be a silo yourself.

What does that mean? If you only understand technology, or only sales, or only finance, then you can only converse with one of the other party’s silos. What you need is the ability to switch freely between different dimensions—today discussing technical architecture with the CTO, tomorrow discussing return on investment with the CFO, the day after understanding the real pain points of frontline employees.

This kind of cross-dimensional ability is essentially the cross-domain connection I’ve always talked about. It’s not about understanding everything, but about understanding enough to translate between different professional languages.

My own cross-domain background—theology, the circular economy, AI, entrepreneurship—actually becomes a huge advantage in business development. Because I can talk technology with engineers, strategy with bosses, and organizational culture with HR—and not by pretending to understand, but by genuinely being able to converse within their context.

The Silo Effect in the Age of AI

Interestingly, the arrival of AI makes the silo effect even more worth discussing.

On one hand, AI can accelerate the formation of silos. Each department adopts its own AI tools, builds its own data pipelines, develops its own automation workflows. Without a unified architecture, the information breakdown between these AI systems could be even more severe than the breakdown between people. At least when people meet, they can pick up on what’s left unsaid; AI only recognizes the data formats it’s fed.

On the other hand, AI can also become a tool for breaking silos. When an organization has a unified data platform and AI agents, information from different departments can be aggregated in real time, cross-analyzed, and formed into a holistic view. The full picture that used to require three meetings to piece together can now be presented in a single dashboard.

But a tool is just a tool. The root of the silo effect is a human problem—it’s parochialism, it’s distrust, it’s an unwillingness to spend time understanding other people’s languages. These problems won’t automatically disappear just because AI exists.

Either Translate, or Leave

Back to the most practical level. If you’re doing business development and facing an organization deep in silos, you have two choices.

First, become a translator. Understand the logic of each silo, find the common interests between them, and help them build bridges for dialogue. Then, in turn, “lead” the partner’s team—not through authority, but through holistic vision and information advantage—guiding them through the decision-making process to completion.

Second, end the meeting immediately and don’t waste time spinning your wheels. Save your energy for the next opportunity with a healthier organization and a clearer decision-making process.

There’s no third option.

Pushing hard against silos, you’ll only become a consumable in their internal politics. Retreating in the face of silos, you lose the very meaning of business development’s existence.

The highest realm of business development is to let information flow where it should flow, to give people who originally couldn’t make decisions the ability to decide because of your presence. As for the product—it naturally gets sold.