Gather the GURUs.

The Internet converges gurus and their disparate ideas and visions, helping describe what cutting-edge business, organizational and communication thinking is going to look like in the work place and retail markets in the immediate future.

Back in the dark ages of communication--before Yahoo! when the Internet was lightly populated and slow--I managed corporate communication for a U.S. $3-billion energy company that prided itself on maintaining excellent, cutting-edge internal communication, including an array of human resource--nurtured training efforts. It was the very early 1990s (the "dark, dark ages," remember) and no one in traditional organizational communication could really foresee the combined communication, cultural and economic effect of today's digital world.

Back then, when we wanted to expose an organization to the latest business guru with some insights into how to motivate people and promote effective teams in the midst of fundamental chaos in their work lives and work places, we would arrange a series of presentations to differing internal and external audiences within the company's headquarters city. We would stock up on videos and printed material to pass on to all of the folks we were logistically prevented from inviting to hear the speaker in person.

At the most, several hundred "thought leaders" (business leaders in our industry, the company board and officers, key managers) in three or four separate sessions would be "touched" by a Tom Peters, Peter Drucker or Ken Blanchard. The osmosis--if it occurred among masses of employees--was slow and geared to the earlier nondigital times when information was not transferred by a few mouse clicks.

Although nothing is ever going to replace face-to-face human interaction for learning and sharing, the ability of teleconferencing via satellite and Internet real-time training via PC or other cyberspace-hooked devices makes it possible now to connect mass, worldwide audiences with the likes of Martha Stewart, Yahoo!'s Jerry Yang, Intel's Andy Grove and Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela all at the same venue. The technology is changing both what I call the "guru effect" and the power of communicating ideas about communication.

The last two years in the fall, I have been drawn to a program called "Lessons in Leadership" offered by a Louisville, Kentucky-based business conferencing and teleconferencing company, WynCom, Inc., in cooperation with 177 universities and business organizations globally. With an array of "stars" from the corporate, political and media worlds, the company now has successfully conducted five annual all-day programs in the leadership series, running real-time, live programs from several locations that are simultaneously beamed to audiences at local sites spread across the major U.S. population centers and 49 other countries.

Within an 8-hour span on November 15, 2000, "Lessons" was delivered to a global audience approaching 100,000 people--70,000 in the U.S. and 25,000-30,000 scattered around the globe. That follows audiences of about 85,000 each at similar programs the two previous years.

"What the teleconferencing allows us to do is go out and get the top business speakers and bring them to markets that we could not otherwise afford to bring them to," says Tony Condi, WynCom's Louisville-based executive producer. "It is hard to take a Tom Peters or Ken Blanchard or Stephen Covey to Billings, Montana; we just don't have the market potential in those cities."

WynCom has built an effective network by working with what Condi describes as a university liaison system that includes every college and university in the U.S., sharing revenues with them. "They like to be able to deliver this type of program to local business and community audiences," Condi says. "We try as much as possible to take a back seat and let them take all of the credit (locally)." (All of the logistics, however, from catering to the downlinks to the internal work at each venue, WynCom handles internally.)

In Southern California the liaison is with little-known Chapman University, a small Orange County-based private college with big ideas and a reputation for building satellite campuses for working adults with an emphasis on leadership education. It offers traditional MBAs, but also a separate master's program in organizational leadership, for which it has gained some national prominence.

A business buzzword for more than a decade, "leadership" is what organizations of any size stress in their training and communication these days. And whether one is following it or providing it, leadership is a valuable commodity to have, hold and pass on. Organizational communicators, whether they realize it or not, have a responsibility for passing it on by helping people recognize, emulate and understand leadership.

"The reason Chapman is involved is that we provide one of the top organizational leadership programs in America, and we wanted to get more involved in promoting these 'lessons in leadership' issues," says Kurtis Takamine, Ph.D., an organizational leadership professor at one of Chapman's satellite adult campuses in Los Angeles County. "They are the same issues that we are trying to promote at Chapman, so we saw a real collaboration opportunity. It has been really good for us. We get our graduate students involved. They get to interact with a lot of different types of people as a result."

The Internet and web-based access is the next evolution for this program, WynCom's Condi says. If e-commerce is to grow, online communication must also expand and improve.

"The Internet gives large and diverse sets of people easy, cheap and timely access to the information they need to make safe decisions and coordinate complex activities," wrote one of the Lessons in Leadership teleconference stars, Don Tapscott, chairman of Digital 4 Sight and an author of seven business books, in the Oct. 2, 2000, issue of Forbes ASAP.

The Internet converges gurus and their disparate ideas and visions, helping describe what cutting-edge business, organizational and communication thinking is going to look like in the work place and retail markets in the immediate future. And the free-form presentations teleconferenced globally allow the written information in the thick WynCom workbook to come to life.

The presentations allow you to hear Tom Peters describe American democracy as a "wonderful, messy system" that works, and make the emphatic observation that employees today "rule the roost," with bosses kept around mostly to run the copying machine and make sure the employees are happy. "People's contributions to a team's results are what counts," Peters told his global audience.

"The people I talked to were hyped up," says Takamine, reflecting on last fall's Los Angeles-based downlink conference site. "There were experts that some of them met for the first time through the videoconferencing, and it really inspired them. That is the whole purpose of all this, after all."

Obviously, the HR and motivational professionals will develop countless ways in the years ahead to expose people to the latest organizational thinking. The paradigms will keep shifting, we can be assured, but when we think about boosting communication support, being able to link an all-star cast of cutting-edge thinkers is an effective way to get people's attention and give them some substantive information, too.

From both a training/motivation and communication/information-sharing standpoint, organizations can get the attention of their employees and community contacts by using technology to plug them into the gurus with something to say. It gives the proponents of distance learning encouragement to do more. And communicators, I think, can develop ways to put punch into an organization's messages that grow tired when they are heard only through the same internal voices.

"I don't think we have the only approach," says Condi, who has helped put on all of WynCom's global teleconferencing sessions. "It is one of the approaches. We're one of the few firms that present this type of programming on this scale. It is not an easy task to pull off. I don't think you are going to see a whole lot more programs on this scale because the risk is very, very great."

It seems apropos that business communicators now begin to take risks, too, mirroring the content of the messages they are trying to deliver to employee audiences. Condi thinks WynCom's experience shows that communication professionals "should not shy away from teleconferencing technology," but embrace it the way the Internet and e-mail are now accepted as regular conduits for both formal and informal communication within organizations.

"Sometimes the technology seems too expensive and not workable for your needs," says Condi, a former marketing professional who gained broadcast training at WynCom. "The more you work with the technology, the better you become at using it and at delivering it. Communicators should really take hold of it and use it to the best of their advantage."

Condi likes the challenge of being continually flexible and willing to alter the program from year to year in response to feedback and movement up the learning curve. "Lessons" began as a four-day teleconferencing series over two months and has evolved into the one-day session with fewer downlink sites but a larger, broader audience spread over more of the globe.

"We try to use some of Tom Peters's words and 're-invent' the program each year," he says. "We feel we have to do that, our audience demands that, and we have to deliver that. I personally take that as a charge to me to bring something new to the audience each year.

"We have to go our and do our marketing and then sit back and see if the registrations will come in. Not many people are willing to take that risk. I think you'll see some people imitate this type of thing; and I see different people trying to do similar things on the Web, which is great, but right now ours is the perfect medium, I think."

If your communication budget is tight, however, global teleconferencing may not be a realistic communication alternative. Condi won't talk about what WynCom spends to put on its once-a-year global session, only that it is in the multiple millions of dollars." He reiterates that it is a "substantial risk" for the company each year, noting that is why it has few competitors for this part of its business.

"I am not aware of anyone else who has produced these types of audiences that we have been able to gather worldwide," says Condi, sounding more matter-of-fact than boastful. "Our program has been insured through Lloyds of London, and we have been informed by them that this is the largest insured broadcast of its type in the world."

Richard Nemec is a Los Angeles writer and communication consultant.