No breakout sessions. No panel discussions. Just a single speaker on the main stage for 12 sessions, each session lasting an hour and a half, over the course of four days. Sound boring? Old fashioned? Think again. This is actually the structure of the TED Conference, one of the most forward-thinking, world-changing conferences held today.

The meeting format might sound like a recipe to put attendees to sleep, but nodding heads in the audience are hardly a problem at TED (which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design). In fact, TED delegates attend by invitation only and the conference is consistently sold out at least a year in advance. The room is filled with some of the brightest, most active minds in the world: think Goldie Hawn, Richard Branson, Daryl Hannah, Forrest Whitaker, Paul Simon, Bill Gates, the Google guys, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar - and those are just the attendees.

TED speakers are selected from "the world's greatest thinkers and doers." There are usually 50 speakers per conference. And each is given 18 minutes to give "the talk of their lives," said June Cohen, director of TED media and co-producer of the conference. "Eighteen minutes is kind of the magic number. It's long enough to develop an idea, but short enough to keep people's attention."

Those 18-minute talks may range from an economist discussing a plan to form the first commodities market in Ethiopia, to a former U.S. vice president discussing how to avert a climate crisis, to a church vicar pondering how God could allow hundreds of thousands of people to die in a natural disaster. The talks are full of "ideas worth spreading," Cohen said, and they are given in the hope that audience members will further the ideas, take action, help make a difference. Every speaker is a leader in his or her field, and those fields vary widely: For instance, Bill Clinton, Jane Goodall, Jeff Bezos, and Rick Warren have all spoken there. And some of the most popular, transformative talks every year are given by people who are not well-known.

Building TED

So what's the purpose of bringing all these people from various walks of life together each year? It all started in 1984, when Richard Saul Wurman, an information architect, realized that "some really interesting things were happening in the fields of technology, entertainment, and design," Cohen said. "Each of these fields were significantly affecting the world and the future, and Wurman believed they were interconnected in interesting ways. He believed that the thinkers and doers in each of these fields could benefit from making powerful connections with those in the other fields."

So Wurman launched the TED Conference to bring leaders from these three fields together to share ideas and to understand how their work could be informed by the work of others. The conference has always been held in Monterey, Calif.

Today, TED has expanded beyond the fields of technology, entertainment, and design "to encompass the idea that all knowledge is related," Cohen said. "Most of us spend time at conferences that are focused on our own industries, which are very valuable, but TED provides an inspired view of what's going on in other industries. I always walk away with a new way of looking at my own field."

In 2001, Wurman sold the conference to The Sapling Foundation, media entrepreneur Chris Anderson's foundation. Anderson continues to run the show and has made a few changes. Most notably, in 2005, Anderson introduced the TED Prize, which is awarded each year to three individuals "with world-changing potential," according to the TED Web site (www.ted.com). Each recipient receives a trophy, $100,000, and the support of the TED community to help fulfill his or her wish. Former winners include Bono, who wished for help in building a social movement of more than one million American activists for Africa. Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky wished that through developing an IMAX film and a groundbreaking competition for children, his art work could persuade millions of people to join a global conversation about sustainability. And inventor Robert Fischell wished for help in discovering new cures for brain disorders utilizing his responsive neurostimulator computer device implanted into the cranial bone connected by wires to electrodes in the brain. This year's prize winners include Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, photojournalist James Nachtwey, and former President Bill Clinton. Although TED has changed some over the years, it continues to operate with the same objectives for which it was founded. "Our guiding principles are first, that all knowledge is interconnected," Cohen said. "And second, that there is great value in gathering people from very different disciplines and watching what happens when they interact."

Designing TED

While TED's structure of a single voice on a single stage at all times is unique these days, it certainly works for this conference. Instead of boring participants, each new speaker offers vibrant new thoughts to consider and ideas to discuss, keeping the room expectant and interested. In addition, the talks are interspersed with musical and dramatic performances by world-class performers.

"It's actually a very dramatic and theatrical environment, so it really keeps people's focus for those four days," Cohen said. "One of the things that sets TED apart is that we really value people's time. If we're going to ask people to spend hours or days at our conference, we believe we have to make sure every moment on stage is worth their time. And that just comes down to preparation. It's harder and harder to keep people's attention these days," Cohen said. It's up to them to make sure they provide something that will.

TED is also different because attendance - by invitation only - is limited to about 1,100 attendees. To grow larger would destroy the intimate environment of sharing that is TED, Cohen said. Attendees are chosen carefully so that everyone in attendance has valuable ideas to bring to the event. And it's not the same group every year: "We feel it's very important to have turnover in attendance each year," Cohen said.

While some attendees are invited because TED organizers know them by reputation or through introduction from someone in the TED community, people typically hear about the conference and ask if they can attend. "We now ask people to fill out an application," Cohen said. "With the application, we learn not only what they have done in their careers, but also what they feel they could get from the conference and what they can bring to it. We created the application process to give us a more systemized way of determining who people are."

Rather than opening for Q&A during the sessions, TED organizers encourage people "to continue the conversation during the breaks," Cohen said. And because every attendee is carefully chosen, each has plenty to add to those break time discussions.

"Everyone who attends could very well be on stage," Cohen said. "We try to create camaraderie between speakers and attendees. Most speakers stay all four days and watch the other speakers and attend the social events."

Those events include coffee breaks, lunches, dinners, and parties, all included in the program. The conference also includes a five-mile run one morning, an opportunity for participants to test drive "forward-thinking automobiles," and a closing beach party, according to Cohen. "Our goal with all this is to create a social context where people can continue talking, learning, and collaborating," she said.

All that quality interaction hinges on TED's ability to recruit top-notch speakers who provide ideas worth discussing. And because no speakers are paid for presenting "the talk of their lives" at TED, that can require some heavy lifting. "We do a lot of research, and put a lot of effort into finding and inviting the right people to speak," Cohen said. "A lot of it is introduction; it's useful to get referrals from others who have spoken at TED. We send in-depth emails about what speakers get from TED, and our Web site has really helped; it gives them a sense of the quality we shoot for. As word has gotten out about us, more doors are opening more easily now."

In choosing the right speakers to wow each year's audience, "we look for people with great ideas that are relevant at the moment, but also people who we know are good storytellers," Cohen continued. "You can have the most interesting person with the most interesting idea, and if they don't approach it in the right way, it will fall flat."

To ensure that speakers' talks hit a high note, TED organizers conduct fairly extensive training with speakers prior to the conference. "There's a lot of e-mail and intense phone conversations," Cohen said. "We discuss who the audience is and what their expectations are, and help them shape their ideas. We also provide standard advice about rehearsing for time." TED speakers don't generally provide attendees with handouts or other take-aways, as at many professional conferences. But at the conclusion of the conference, each attendee receives a DVD of the full conference proceedings. Created by TED's highly sophisticated audiovisual team, which uses eight high-definition cameras, the DVD is extremely high quality and a valuable keepsake.

Going Online

While only invited attendees receive the official TED DVD, anyone can now access many of the much-talked-about "TEDTalks" recorded on it. That's because, in an effort to ease the registration crunch (the conferences are usually sold out at least a year in advance), and to further its goal of spreading ideas, TED recently launched TEDTalks Online, which makes many of the talks from its conferences available online for free. While Cohen admits it was "a gutsy decision" to make so much valuable content available at no charge, "it has been really interesting to watch the effects of such an open business model."

"It has been a really huge and transformative initiative to put the talks online, which premiered in June 2006," Cohen said. "Before that, TED was a black box; what happened at TED stayed at TED. But we felt the talks deserved a wider audience. Our goal was really, genuinely, to spread ideas, to reach everyone who can't come to TED."

After a year online, it appears that TED is reaching its goal: At press time, the online talks had been watched more than 16 million times by more than 8 million people worldwide. Through the online talks, some of the ideas of TED speakers have found widespread new audiences and amazing results.

TEDTalks Online "changed my life completely," said Hans Rosling, a Swedish professor of global health who developed remarkable trend-revealing software to help people better understand social and economic development around the world. "For a long time, I had been trying to transmit a fact-based world view; we all know the facts about what's going on in Asia and other places, but it's so difficult to grasp the magnitude of it."

While Rosling's live talk at the TED conference was a hit, it has been viewed online more than one million times, Cohen said. "[Going online] brought it out to the young audiences," Rosling said. "Eighteen minutes was so suitable to be looked upon in class, in the office. I got about 200 times the audience I had before. Within two weeks [of the talk being posted online], I was speaking before the British Parliament and the European Union about how we should use statistics in the future, and I keep collecting prizes every month. It really sped up the process, whereby Google acquired our software, so they now do the development and I'm now working on continuous innovations."

Stories like Rosling's overwhelmingly assure TED organizers that posting talks online was the right decision - as does the continued and increased popularity of the live conference. "Our intent was to relieve pressure from the conference, but it actually had the reverse effect," Cohen said. "We raised the price of the conference 50 percent and sold out in 10 days a year in advance, and that was entirely due to our online presence. When we decided to put the content online, one objection or question that people had about it was, why would people want to come to TED if they can get the talks for free? But the more we put out there, the more people want to be there."

Keeping a Live Focus

Although TED organizers continue to see the benefits of online content and virtual networking, they and their attendees have not lost sight of the completely different value of meeting together face to face. "There is just something that happens when you're in the same room with people," Cohen said. "There's a magic to being in the room when something happens that an online experience can't match. You can be energized in a way that you can't quite be online. And when you're there in person, you're able to participate in the same content with others and then find new and unexpected ways to talk to each other about it." Within the TED community, it's clear that online content will not take the place of live events, as the TED model is focused on harnessing the value of both live events and virtual content, and is well aware that each offers unique benefits. "Online [learning] is more goal-oriented," Cohen said. "You choose which speaker you will listen to, you choose which person you will chat with. "But a live event allows for serendipity," Cohen continued. "You never know who you're going to meet or what speaker might grab you and have an impact on you."

Ted's Ideas for Your Meeting

• Implement strict time limits for your speakers - To fit within an exact time limit, a speech must be well-rehearsed and tightly scripted.
• Work with speakers in advance - Don't sign a speaker's contract and not speak with him or her again until the day of your meeting. Work with each speaker before the conference to make sure he or she understands your audience and expectations, and to help shape and communicate their ideas.
• Learn more about your attendees - While your association may not ask members to apply to attend your meeting, you could request a resume from each attendee to learn more about his or her expertise and determine what he or she might bring to or gain from the event.
• Share knowledge - Don't be afraid to give away some of the content of your meeting, whether as Webcasts, podcasts, or in another format. Being generous with your body of knowledge is sure to yield good things for your industry, and will probably create increased interest in your live conference as well.
• Be generous with your breaks and networking events - It "creates a social context where people can continue talking, learning, and collaborating," according to June Cohen, director of TED media and co-producer of the TED conference.

Meeting to Watch TED via Simulcast in Aspen

In response to growing demand, TED is launching a new way to experience the TED2008 conference by gathering 300 attendees in Aspen, Colo. to watch the full program live from Monterey, Calif. via satellite Feb. 27-March 1. Several speakers on the line-up - including renowned historian Walter Isaacson - will present at TED@Aspen.

Two-thirds of those who go to Monterey each year for the conference already watch TED via simulcast lounges. Remote simulcasts offer another way to grow the TED community since TED2008 sold out more than a year in advance and has more than 3,000 people on the waitlist.

At the new Doerr-Hosier Conference Center in Aspen, attendees will have the choice of watching the simulcast sitting in a theater-style area with a large screen, or in smaller, viewing pods with plasma monitors and just a dozen other attendees. There will also be areas for blogging.

A full social program will include a mountaintop dinner and an evening in downtown Aspen, followed by an after party. A ski excursion will follow the conference with some TEDsters from Monterey coming to Aspen.

The TED@Aspen membership will be $3,000, half the minimum membership cost to go to Monterey. The intention is to make this a regular part of TED going forward.

The Architect Behind Ted

TED was born in 1984 out of the observation by architect Richard Saul Wurman of a powerful convergence between Technology, Entertainment, and Design. The first TED included demos of the newly released Macintosh computer and Sony compact disc, while mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot demonstrated how to map coastlines with his newly discovered fractals and AI guru Marvin Minsky outlined his powerful new model of the mind.

Despite the stellar lineup, the event lost money, and it was six years before Wurman and his partner Harry Marks tried again. This time, the world was ready. TED has been held regularly in Monterey, Calif., ever since, attracting a growing and influential audience from many different disciplines united by their curiosity, open-mindedness, and desire to think outside the box. TED was always an invitation-only event; it never had an advertising budget or a PR campaign.

Media entrepreneur Chris Anderson met with Wurman in 2000 to discuss the conference's future. Wurman, at age 65, was ready to pass on the reins. A deal was struck, and in 2001, Anderson's foundation (The Sapling Foundation) acquired TED, and he became TED's curator.

Anderson pledged to stand by the principles that made TED great: the same inspired format, the same breadth of content, the same commitment to seek out the most interesting people on earth and let them communicate what they are passionate about, untainted by corporate influence. The years 2001-2006 saw three major additions to the TED family:

• a sister conference, TEDGlobal, held in a different country every other year 
• the TED Prize, which grants its winners "one wish to change the world"
• a ground-breaking audio and video podcast series, TEDTalks, in which the best TED content is released free online.

Wurman may have retired from TED, but he continues to innovate - and abbreviate! Today, Wurman is a member of the Business Innovation Factory's (better known as BIF) Research Advisory Council. Check out www.businessinnovationfactory.com, and you'll see the spark that led to TED at work at BIF: "The Business Innovation Factory shares my passion for creating experiences that spark intelligent conversations. Their Collaborative Innovation Summit attracts smart individuals who tell a fresh story about their passions, ideas, and failures. BIF understands that when you look in the grey area between disciplines, good, inspiring concepts will arise," said Wurman.

Contributing Editor Nancy Mann Jackson is a freelance writer in Birmingham, Ala.