Last night at dinner, a merchant banker called John Stancliffe told me how companies he worked with used to cope with "overload" before there was email (in the 1960's at least)

• Letters/telegrams used to go in and out of the organisation every day. Lots of them.
• Each morning a couple of women would precis the communiques
• Those summaries would then be sent to the people in charge so that they could stay on top of things

For groups of a hundred - there or thereabouts - managers/directors could be on top of everything that their staff were doing and the decisions that were being made. Beyond that, three factors made the process unwieldy.

• The summarizers' jobs became more time-consuming (though this could obviously be alleviated by growing the precis team)
• The summary document became too big
• The directors didn't know the people under them well enough to get the most out of the summaries