The current credit crunch aside, investment banks have enjoyed a long run of record performance since the burst of the dot-com bubble—in some ways the golden age of investment banking and securities trading. In the process, most firms have expanded into geographies and increased their workforce in unprecedented ways.

Yet many institutions find the going tough as clients demand—and increasingly expect—integrated services, including (among other things) advice, the raising of capital, and risk-management solutions. In this environment, banks often struggle to leverage the potential of their talented and highly compensated professionals. Many banks blame their size and complexity, the pace of work, and, above all, “silo thinking” for this problem. Opportunities to build on the success of a particular product in one territory are therefore often overlooked elsewhere, while sales teams serving specific clients largely ignore the possibility of cross-selling products from other groups.

Fortunately, help is at hand in the form of network-mapping tools that identify and encourage value-creating connections across organizations. Companies in a variety of sectors, from biotechnology to construction, have been using these well-established techniques to track and replicate high-performing networks, to help employees emulate the collaborative behavior of other colleagues, and to serve customers more...