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

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 knowledge transfer, ranging from that gained by the same group doing similar tasks to sophisticated "expert transfer," requiring help from experts elsewhere in the company.

Common Knowledge uses specific examples drawn from major companies including Texas Instruments, British Petroleum, Ford Motor Co., Chevron, Ernst & Young -- even the U.S. Army. Dixon makes good use of occasional charts and tables and writes cleanly and crisply. The result is a book that covers a lot of theory, yet makes it concrete and understandable in the real world.