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New field for Infomart. Infomart, SDC's agent in Canada, recently announced that it had entered the field of electronic publishing with an influx of $6 million from two of Canada's largest communication companies, Southam Inc. and Torstar Corporation. Infomart recently hosted an international forum on the future of videotex in Canada.

WHEN delivering his Elbourne lecture Sir Geoffrey Vickers related the following incident. ‘As a very inexperienced subaltern in the old war, my company commander once said to me: “Vickers, the company will bathe this afternoon. Arrange.” In the Flemish hamlet where we were billeted the only bath of any kind was in the local nunnery. The nuns were charity itself but I couldn't ask them to bathe a hundred men. I reviewed other fluid‐containing objects which might be potential baths—cattle drinking troughs, empty beer barrels—and found practical or ethical objections to them all. At that point I had the misfortune to meet my company commander again and was forced to confess that I had not yet solved my problem. He was annoyed. “Whatever have you been doing all this time?” he said. Then, turning his own mind to the problem, apparently for the first time, he added: “Take the company limbers off their wheels, put the tilts inside and the cookers beside them for the hot water; four baths each four feet square, four men to a bath, do the whole job in an hour. Why don't you use your brains?”’

This case serves as an introduction to the concept of economic value added (EVA). The student is placed in the position of Valmont's CFO to decide whether EVA can live up to its promise to motivate managers to act like shareholders and ultimately lead them to make value-enhancing decisions that can reverse Valmont's weak earnings and lackluster stock-price performance. The case works best if students are acquainted with the concepts of cost of capital and net present value. The teaching note that is available for registered faculty explains how to incorporate the accompanying six-minute video supplement.

There is limited research that indicates the relation between knowledge management practices (KMPs), organizational culture (OC) and operational efficiency performance (OE) by using Balanced scorecards (BSC) specifically in oil and gas sector. This relationship is not yet acknowledged through empirical tests. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap by providing a better understanding of that relationship and its importance with regard to business outcomes.

In order to examine the relationship between OC and OE, this research takes a BSC perspective with the mediating impact of KMPs. Three hypotheses were developed using literature review and tested through the application of confirmatory factor analysis in structural equation modeling. Altogether, 568 valid responses were collected from one of the biggest oil and gas companies in the UAE.

All KMPs were found to have significant relationship with OE and OC. Also, KMPs mediate the relationship between OC and OE. In addition, the results show that the standardized coefficients of these paths and the loadings of the indicators on their factors are significant. Pearson’s correlations indicate strong evidences of the joint impact of OC and KM practices on OE, with a possible mediator impact of KM practices on OE.

One of research limitations is the type of organization. Future research may include other industries such as manufacturing and construction. Only the operational variable is evaluated and there is no consideration of other dimensions such as leadership type, organizational structure and technology.

This paper is the first in the UAE and the region to examine the relationship between OC and KMPs by considering OE from a BSC perspective with the mediating impact of KMPs.