I build companies on both breaks in this book.
I started writing this book in 2018. Building companies kept getting in the way. Looking back, that was a blessing: the years in between tested the idea.
Why
Every organisation leaks value in two ways. It owns resources it doesn't fully use: materials it throws away, heat it vents into the sky, machines that stand idle, people whose best skills are never asked for, data that would be worth a fortune to somebody else. And it works in chains full of steps nobody would design in today.
The first leak is a wasted resource. The second a useless step. This book is about finding both, and about the two moves that turn them into value: trade the wasted resource with a silo where it is treasure, and cut the useless step so the maker meets the buyer again. One principle, two breaks.
It is a practical book. It does not ask you to be better than your own goals. Every method in it assumes you will keep optimising your own castle, and shows why that is exactly the reason to trade.
Whose shoulders
Gunter Pauli's Blue Economy showed that one sector's waste can be another's raw material. Peter Lacy and Jakob Rutqvist's Waste to Wealth gave managers the best taxonomy of wasted value the circular economy has. The lean movement of Womack and Jones spent thirty years hunting useless steps inside processes. Gillian Tett's The Silo Effect explained why organisations fall apart into tribes that can't see each other. And the Danish town of Kalundborg has been doing everything in this book since 1972.
I wrote another book because these shelves never meet. The exchange between two silos that each keep their own goal never became a method a manager can run on a Tuesday morning. Lean never asks whether a whole layer of middlemen is the useless step. And in all those books, waste means atoms. The two categories where I spent most of my working life, unused talent and unshared data, are in none of them.
Where it comes from
The thinking in this book goes back to 2005, when I began working with Nico Baken on trans-sector innovation: the economy as a network of sectors instead of a stack of them.
The roots go deeper. They lie in stewardship, from my Christian background. That is the foundation under my thinking, and under my drive to change this.
Stewardship starts with a simple realisation: what you have, you were given. You don't own it, you look after it, and your responsibility reaches further than your own interest. That goes for materials and money, and just as much for time, knowledge and talent. Three principles follow from it, and they steer my work.
- Look not only to your own interest, but also to that of the other.
- Leave nothing unused that could help someone else further.
- Put what you were given to work for others, instead of keeping it safe in the ground.
The word that matters is “also”. Not instead of your own interest, but next to it. That is why this book never asks you to give up your own goal. An organisation that leaves resources and people unused is burying what it was given. The exchange is how you put it to work.
The line, 2005–2026
2005
Trans-sector innovation
The work with Nico Baken begins: looking at the economy as a network in which sectors share almost everything they do.
2016
IoT Gurus: the talk
The first Breaking Silos talk, a proposal for the Berkeley IoT Executive Course, with examples published at breakingsilos.org. The same year, co-creation of iSHARE starts in Dutch logistics.
2017
On stage
“BreakingSilos with Industrial IoT” at IoT World Europe. The map gets drawn on whiteboards for the first time.
2018
iSHARE and Directify
iSHARE launches as a trust framework instead of a platform: the first break, applied to data. Directify is founded to give makers a direct road to their buyers. That is the second break, in software. Writing begins.
2026
The book
Eight years of building on both breaks, tested in practice and written down, the wrecks included.
The author
Gerard van der Hoeven builds companies on both breaks in this book. He is Executive Director of the iSHARE Foundation, the European trust framework that lets organisations share data without giving it away, and founder of Directify, the orchestration platform that gives makers a direct road to their buyers across borders. Through his holding Neveoh he builds ventures across data sovereignty (Protium.digital), logistics carbon intelligence (Loginex) and 3D-printed concrete homes (Silva Villas). The sectors differ on purpose, because the overlap is the point. He has told the Breaking Silos story on international stages since 2016. He lives in the Netherlands, near the garden where this book begins. There, two children once built something from the same bricks that was taller than either could build alone.