At a company where I worked many years ago, circulating correspondence was an everyday practice. It was also one of the simplest and best knowledge management techniques I've ever seen.

Whenever you wrote a letter -- and we wrote a lot of letters -- you made two copies: one to file, one to circulate. Every week (or every so often) you took the circulating set, culled any that included confidential dope or made you look more stupid than usual, stuck on a buck slip, and put them into your outbox. By the time the folder returned, it was generally time to refill it and send it out again. Everybody participated, including the chairman and the president.

"A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard," said Herman Melville's Ishmael; when it came to learning my job, circulating correspondence was mine. Reading my superiors' letters opened a window into how they conducted business with the world outside; I aped things more experienced colleagues did, and saw how they handled tricky situations; I copied useful addresses into my Rolodex (another antique). I learned who knew what, and that made me better at asking for advice.

Circulating correspondence was obligatory, easy, and genuinely useful.

As such, it stands in stark contrast to much of what today passes for knowledge management -- an activity that has assumed immense importance in the corporate world. ...

As time marches on, and Moore's Law with it, this technology gets swifter, stronger, and subtler. Why, then, is there a nagging sense that all of it misses the point? Or that much of the time it yields no more insight than a file of circulated letters? -- Quoted from Thomas A Stuart, The Wealth of Knowledge - Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-First Century Organization, December 2001.