Common Knowledge: How Companies Thrive by Sharing What They Know.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Review

By Nancy M. Dixon. Harvard Business School Press, 188 pages. $29.95.

The book's title serves up a cute pun: Its subject isn't "common knowledge" in the sense that it's widely known, but internal information and processes that companies pass among themselves. As author Nancy M. Dixon points out, that information -- if properly transmitted -- is vital to sustained competitive advantage.

But Dixon, an associate professor of administrative sciences at George Washington University, contends that all knowledge isn't created -- or shared -- equally. One of the book's key arguments is that knowledge-sharing isn't a one-size-fits-all phenomenon, but is distinct to different situations and company profiles. In fact, she distinguishes between five separate, if generic, kinds of...