For $14,000, a Weeklong Firehose of Silicon Valley Kool-Aid

Futurist and Stanford professor Paul Saffo looked out over a mostly male, mostly affluent-looking audience one morning this week and challenged them to identify the most significant event of 1989. "Fall of the Berlin Wall?" someone offered. Saffo shook his head and gestured at a slide showing a memo titled "Information Management: A Proposal," the first blueprint for what became the World Wide Web. "In terms of history, this did more to change the world," he said solemnly. His audience of 90 executives from finance, energy, and other sectors murmured and nodded approvingly--this is just the kind of perspective they came for.