Journal of General Management

A key source of competitive advantage stems from the possession and use of specialised knowledge. But to use such knowledge, firms must learn to share it both within and across appropriate departments and firm boundaries. Based on our empirical research on the key factors affecting knowledge-sharing success and our consulting work putting our findings into action, we develop a series of questions and guidelines designed to guide managers in their own knowledge-sharing efforts.

Management is synonymous with planning, order and control. This paper invokes the novel image of a chimpanzees' tea party to highlight the limitations of control-based approaches to managing and to suggest counter-intuitive possibilities.

For the last two decades or more, agency theory has provided the dominant guiding framework for the research of governance. Despite the results of this effort being described as “remarkably inconsistent not only with the theory but with each other” (Daily, Dalton and Rajagopalan, 2003, p. 152) there have been few attempts to offer alternate paradigms for research. The result of this limitation is that several academics and commentators have had cause to publicly acknowledge that we actually know little about governance.

Our understanding of the relationship between governance and subsequent organisational performance is at best haphazard, at worst, little more than an assumption. One attempt at breaking this stalemate concerns venturing into the ‘black box’ (LeBlanc and Schwartz, 2004), an activity that requires a different battery of research skills including a range of qualitative research methods, direct observation of practice, oral histories, case studies, interventions, action research and the analysis of decision-making. Few of these practices sit comfortably within the normal science (Kuhn, 1970) practices of much governance research conducted to date. The aim of this paper is to discuss the attributes of such black box research, identify various approaches to its conduct and to present a brief summary of interim results from a range of research activities in progress in New Zealand.

The primary aim of the research ‘agenda’ informing these activities is firstly, to determine how a relationship between governance and subsequent organisational performance may operate given the complexities of such an approach and to identify whether specific attributes (either governance architecture or board capabilities) actually influence organisational outcomes. Results to date offer a tentative glimpse at what may be effective governance. In time, they may seriously challenge the relevance of much current research and what is increasingly being promoted by various agencies and accepted by practitioners as best practice.

Any form of partnership depends on knowledge sharing to fulfill its promise and deliver business value. However different types of partnership need different mechanisms to support the process. In this paper we explore four categories of inter-organizational collaborative relationships and learn from the relationship managers what makes them successful. We have identified particular organizational arrangements and individual skills and values that make a difference to performance in each category. We suggest that understanding what helps the right knowledge to flow between the various members of a partnership is an important aspect of delivering value in an increasingly networked business world.

Along with the advent of the virtual organisation has come a new form of crime. Cybercrime is any form of criminal activity that involves use of the internet. Although many organisations have their own ideas on how to control the problem, they appear to be working in different ways instead of pooling their forces. However, it is unclear as to who should be responsible for controlling cybercrime. This paper suggests that the issue should be attacked from the level of each individual company through its management, on the national level, and internationally. In doing so, it offers managers practical advice on how to fight cybercrime and calls for the setting up of a global organisation with the power to crack down on such potentially devastating crime.