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Most companies have formal organizational charts that set out the theory of how work gets done. They show who reports to whom, what the different departments are, and how people come together to accomplish their goals. The hierarchy depicted also indicates who are thought to be the pivotal figures, generally those at or near the top.

But in recent years, a group of organizational experts has started to produce maps of how work actually gets done – and it often bears little similarity to the formal organizational chart.

Organizational network analysis charts resemble a spider's web, with endless crisscrossing strands that show who collaborates with whom. The analysts might ask staff to whom they turn to for new ideas, and plot the results of those questionnaires. Or they might ask to whom employees go for work-related information.

• Driving Results Through Social Networks, by Rob Cross and Robert J. Thomas, Jossey-Bass, 217 pages, $32.95

Often, the most important individuals are lower down in the organization, known to colleagues for their knowledge or the speed with which they respond to queries, while formal bosses prove to be bottlenecks, unreachable or not considered of much use in everyday work.

The analysis can show whether individuals interact with different departments in the organization as they get things done, or remain contained within their own silo. It can reveal that someone not thought to be terribly important is a vital informational hub and the loss of that individual might be a disastrous short circuit that would blow the organization's collaborative network.

“By quickly revealing hitherto invisible networks, organizational network analysis makes it possible for leaders to identify collaborative hot spots in their organizations and to monitor critical points of value creation,” write Rob Cross, a professor at the University of Virginia, and Robert J. Thomas, executive director of Accenture's Institute for High Performance, in Driving Results Through Social Networks.

In sales, for example, stories typically circulate about heroic individual accomplishments by certain stars, creating the myth that sales is a lone-wolf game.

“ Most leaders do not have accurate pictures of these collaborations and too often undermine important networks by measuring and rewarding individual results ”— The authors

In fact, the authors point out, successful sales occur as an upshot of networks that help to bring together a range of expertise and resources to make customers aware you can solve their problems.

“Unfortunately, most leaders do not have accurate pictures of these collaborations and too often undermine important networks by measuring and rewarding individual results,” the authors note.

Network analysis can counter that blindness by identifying collaborative breakdowns in the organizations – areas where, if you stitch people's work together, you can offer better solutions to customers. The analysis can also indicate where uncoordinated efforts with key clients undermine the potential revenue you can win from that account, or illuminate stars in your organization who contribute more to your sales than you realize by their collaborative impact.

One investment bank the authors worked with used network analysis to help to promote connections between people, through such initiatives as staff rotation programs and brainstorming sessions that brought together employees from each of its regions, as well as a general policy of assisting high performers to broaden their collaborative network even more.

The analysis also opened the eyes of leaders to key talent in generating revenue who had been overlooked by the traditional sales stats that failed to indicate who was helping whom make their numbers.

Network analysis can also help when you bring employees together on project teams. Too often, certain voices have the leader's ear, but a network analysis that maps information flow and problem-solving collaborations may reveal certain experts on the team need to be given a greater voice in decision-making.

It can also show whether the network of people the team has connections to – internally and externally – are the right ones for accomplishing the task. Are you connected to the folk whose expertise or power you will need to be successful?

These analyses can also improve the critical but often neglected task of “onboarding” – smoothing the entry of new employees into the company. The authors urge you to shift your onboarding processes so that, rather than simply providing an overwhelming amount of information to the new recruits in their first few days on the job and leaving them to fend for themselves, you help them to establish a broad network of relationships they can tap to become productive contributors quickly.

On the other side of the human resources equation, when you understand the informal collaborative network that makes your organization run, you can aim in your career development and succession planning to ensure you have replacements for critical information or knowledge brokers, should they leave.

Most of us haven't thought deeply about the informal networks that make our organization run, and this book is useful because it shows the impact and connection to financial results. But it's dry, with even the examples rather limp, and the many network analysis charts the authors provide are reproduced too small to be of any value. It will broaden your thinking, but also leave you wishing for more.

In Addition: With Where In The World Is My Team? (Jossey-Bass, 219 pages, $37.95), consultant Terence Brake didn't want to write another business book. So he went the fable route, which isn't as unique as he seems to think. And, instead of keeping tightly focused, he has produced a rambling, somewhat off-the-wall take on organizational life in a company of hip people who mostly work at a distance from each other in offices around the world as they develop video games.

So you have to suffer through the inanities of their lives to be rewarded every few pages by the not terribly unusual insights into virtual teamwork. Then, at the end – bang – he brings it all together in a 24-page briefing report, supposedly written by the central figure in the book, with enough bullet points and terse phrases to make you wish it was a business book. If virtual teamwork is a problem for your organization, you might find some new ideas in the book and some schemas that help you to understand your difficulties better – but it could be frustrating digging them out.

Just In: In Yoga Inc. (Viking Canada, 260 pages, $32), journalist John Philp shows how yoga was transformed from an ancient spiritual practice into a competitive, commercialized, multimillion-dollar business.

Faith-Based Marketing (John Wiley, 241 pages, $33.95), by marketing specialists Bob Hutchins and Greg Stielstra, is a guide to reaching 140 million Christian customers.

If you want to relax with some science fiction that has business overtones, brothers Dani Kollin and Eytan Kollin, in The Unincorporated Man (Tor, 479 pages, $28.95) sketch out a world in which all individuals are formed into legal corporations at birth and spend many years trying to attain control over their own lives by getting a majority of their own shares.

Special to The Globe and Mail