Heart pounding, I alit at the Fairmont Hotel atop San Francisco's Nob Hill toting six days worth of outfits befitting an iconoclastic do-gooder and a case of my new book "Virus of the Mind." Months earlier, I had been flattered and surprised to be included in a list of 700 scholars, celebrities, philanthropists, and business people invited to the third annual State of the World Forum chaired by Mikhail Gorbachev and Sonia Gandhi.

The theme of the six days of keynotes, panels, presentations, and round-table discussions was ponderous; how to carry the stewardship of our planet into the next millennium. I didn't know exactly how, but I knew it involved memetics, so no matter what else I accomplished, I was making it my mission to infect the right people there with the memetics (the study of ideas and concepts viewed as "living" organisms, capable of reproduction and evolution) meme in the form of a free autographed copy of my book "Virus of the Mind."

The weather in San Francisco was a rare November treat, warm and sunny. It was beautiful weather to go out and run up and down the preposterous hills of the City by the Bay, and it was a good thing I ran. I needed the physical boost to prepare me mentally for the mind-blowing experience of listening to dozens of brilliant, impassioned people each day.

The Forum was designed as a meeting of minds. No one there argued about the right way to rule the world. Instead, people shared their experiences, theories, and passions. The Forum seeks to create a network of communicating change agents loosely guided by a set of values and principles. It was impossible to be there without becoming infected with the passion of the other participants and the memes they championed.

One meme I think we'll see a lot more of in the future came from visionary Dee Hock, founder and CEO emeritus of Visa International. Hock's idea of how to create a huge, workable organization stems from his experience in creating the Visa credit card. He calls such a distributed, self-organizing, adaptive organization a chaordic ("kay-ORD-ic") system.

Visa is a for-profit corporation owned equally by its 23,000 member companies. Its surprisingly few (3,300) employees work scattered across 13 countries, governed by multiple, autonomous boards of directors with geographical society. Visa, says Hock, is a chaord ("KAY-ord") - a new kind of organization he thinks can transform the future of human endeavor. A chaord has no top-down management, no hierarchical org-chart, no central planning committee. The work is done by the member companies and is simply coordinated by the far fewer Visa employees. The system organizes itself.

If indeed Visa is a model that can be replicated - say, for toxic-waste management, police functions, or even world government - we could see a stunning improvement in the effectiveness of our large institutions.

Hock, pushing 70, says he is devoting the rest of his life to setting up a foundation to encourage the creation of global chaordic organizations. Initially concerned about getting anyone else interested in helping, he is now deluged with offers. Even organizational guru Peter Senge of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology bows down to Hock's vision of the future. We haven't seen the last of chaordic systems. Although we've also not seen the last of the traditional corporation, distributed leadership will solve problems that hierarchical leadership cannot.

Illustrating that very point, Richard Pascale of Oxford University gave a wonderful interactive demonstration of distributed leadership. With only a few minutes of practice and a card with red on one side and green on the other for each person, the audience was able to fly a virtual airplane flawlessly, dodging mountains and hitting targets, by continually voting whether to go up or down, left or right. Could a company be directed the same way? Maybe - but there's little incentive for $1 million per year CEOs to explore that avenue.

Another man bringing order out of chaos at the Forum was Boston Philharmonic conductor Ben Zander. Using his vocation as a metaphor for anyone who wants to orchestrate results in life, Zander gave perhaps the most entertainingly informative 75-minute presentation I've ever seen. Zander, bubbly and glowing, took pains to credit and acknowledge his wife Rosamund Stone Zander as co-creator of everything he presented.

Purporting to teach the audience to sing the "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's ninth symphony, Zander surreptitiously demonstrated several key principles of personal effectiveness and organizational management. Although I recognized most of the language and distinctions he presented from seminars we both had taken through Landmark Education (the descendant organization of Werner Erhard's now-defunct est), he did it all in a brilliantly original, demonstrative, interactive, almost subliminal way. His presentation left me electrified and ashamed. I was electrified to see the possibilities for educating people in a fun, participatory way, but ashamed that I'd been wasting the last few years writing books and delivering keynote addresses instead of trying it out myself.

As Hock warned, after hearing about chaordic systems, I wanted to put everything into the chaordic mold. Indeed Zander followed the chaordic principles to a degree; rather than micromanage from the top down, he empowered the members of the group to sing with passion after outlining certain guiding principles. At the end of the session, there we were, singing. We weren't ready for Carnegie Hall, but I'd be surprised if many of us didn't leave with a more powerful outlook on life.

One newfangled idea that seems to be yielding tangible, measurable results today is microenterprise. A panel containing former United Nations ambassador Andrew Young shared wonderful success stories of extending the benefits of capitalism to the poor rather than just complaining about its drawbacks. Muhammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank, Bangladesh, told a wonderful story about microlending to every member of an impoverished community. One woman had to have her arm twisted to take any loan at all, and finally asked for the equivalent of 25 cents. They talked her up to $1.25 as the meme of entrepreneurship spread to the community.

Other topics, important to many and of interest to all of us, were climate change, new ways to educate children, the drug crisis, and community building. New ideas mixed with real politics on the final day when we moved to the Masonic Auditorium for a live BBC broadcast. The highlight of the day was a gentle speech by Hafsat Abiola of the Kudirat Institute for Nigerian Democracy. Her father imprisoned and her mother assassinated as the result of military coups in Nigeria, she spoke to her own personal commitment to purpose, to making her mother proud every day.

I, of course, spoke about memes. I gave a brief presentation to an exciting round-table sponsored by Richard Rathbun and Michael Abkin of the Foundation for Global Community. We then spent time identifying some beneficial and harmful memes for the stewardship of the planet, including ones we had already seen in the memosphere as well as new ones invented for the occasion. My favorite was the frequently seen bumper-sticker admonition "mean people suck."

It was a frustrating, familiar experience trying to design the right memes for the world to use from the top down, as part of a committee. Did all the speakers at this conference share that frustration, from the birthday-celebrating Walter Cronkite to the called-in-sick Mikhail Gorbachev? Once again, I thought about Dee Hock.

How could you empower individuals to spread the memes that they themselves considered beneficial, rather than the doomy, gloomy, and TV-newsroomy memes that we unthinkingly spread? Then I realized I've written two books recommending that people do just that. Both books are popular, but - if only I had used Ben Zander's technique! Someone pointed out to me that nobody reads books; if a new books sells 10,000 copies in a week, it's a best seller. Compare that with the TV show "My So-Called Life," which was canceled despite critical acclaim because "only" ten million people watched each episode.

We need to break into TV and movies, the mass media. Doing so involves taking the beneficial ideas we've been talking about for years and packaging them as sitcoms, thrillers, soft-core porn - that's what gets people's attention! Media coverage of this world-class event, even in its home city of San Francisco, was predictably limited to one press release full of danger memes; toxic chemicals may be in our children's toys. Nothing about memes, microlending, or chaords.

Once again I was reminded of the most wasteful thing we do as human beings. This practice, which requires supreme effort of consciousness to rise above, prevents miracles from occurring every day. It's the practice of paying attention to stereotypes, scuttlebutt, and press releases about someone you haven't met. I felt for Dean Ornish, president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute. A victim of his own success, the "diet guy" must explain before each talk that he's interested in much more than diet, and he can't have lunch with someone without them apologizing for something they're eating or raising an eyebrow at Ornish's own plate.

I also scolded myself for paying attention to the media's portrayal of Jean Houston, co-founder of the Mind/Body Institute, as a flaky psychic, guru to the stars. When I heard her speak at an intimate breakout lunch alongside complexity-theory genius Stuart Kauffman of the Santa Fe Institute, I broke into a smile that wouldn't turn off. She is one smart cookie. Her mastery of metaphor, her understanding of the myths and archetypes that drive us, was the perfect complement to Kauffman's lucid left-brain insight.

The Forum would not have been the same without the children. Dozens of youths, 14 to 24, came from all over the world as full participants in the discussion. I met as many of them as I could, trying to remember what it was like to have my whole life in front of me, to feel the unlimited potential available to one who hasn't yet compromised, sacrificed, or wised up to the so-called realities of adult life, and I thought, maybe the real purpose of the Forum is to bring that state of mind back to all of us.

Web sites mentioned in this column:

"The Chaordic Organization: Out of Control and Into Order" - describes the experiences and thought processes that led to chaordic organization. By Dee Hock; from the 21st Century Learning Initiative.

World Problems and Solutions - includes a list of links to "do-gooders" concerned about the future of the planet, as well as many links to topics ranging from power, energy, population, and the environment and how they all relate to the Earth's future.

"Knowledge Exchange: The False Security of 'Employability'" - an article by Richard Pascale from the April/May 1996 issue of Fast Company.

Grameen Bank, Bangladesh - a collection of articles pertaining to the bank and debate participant Muhammad Yunus. From the Informal Credit homepage.

KIND - home page for the Kudirat Institute for Nigerian Democracy, of which Hafsat Abiola is the director.