By Brian Friel (GOVEXEC.com)

Here's an idea: Gather up the smartest people in the world, put them in a room with executives from your agency, close the door and let the conversations begin. Unlike innovative ideas that develop on the back of dirty cocktail napkins, this one developed in a gorgeous, glass-walled house on a rocky spine overlooking the Big Sur coast in Carmel Highlands, Calif. There, in 1994, a dozen military and information technology experts gathered to consider the impacts of IT and globalization on the United States and on warfare.