The annual TED conference, held at the Long Beach (Calif.) Performing Arts Center, brings together diverse speakers and listeners for four days of presentations and networking. And it has one advantage that corporate planners may never have: TED chooses its audience. “Without an amazing audience, we couldn’t attract amazing speakers,” organizers say at TED.com. “Our speakers aren’t paid—they attend because of the audience.”

That’s not the only meeting tenet flipped on its head by TED. The conference is driven toward complexity on one hand—its attendees represent a broad swath of disciplines, its topics a world of ideas—and toward simplicity on the other—there is but one thing on the agenda: presentations, none more than 18 minutes long.

You may have seen some of those presentations, in fact. They’re now known as TEDTalks, and most are on YouTube, where they’ve garnered hundreds of millions of views.

At TED2011: Photography by Frans Lanting fills the giant rear screen, which was designed by Bob Bonniol, with overall stage design by Tom Hennes. On stage, artist Béatrice Coron talks about her cut-paper cape made of Tyvek.

Expanding its audience is another thing TED does well. Three years after it began posting talks, TED posted, in a way, its secret sauce. June 2009 saw the launch of the TEDx brand—local TED-like events that follow strict guidelines. In less than two years, more than 1,500 TEDx events have been held worldwide.

“We created TEDx in the spirit of TED’s mission of ‘ideas worth spreading,’” says Chris Anderson, curator of TED and founder of the Sapling Foundation, which acquired the TED Conference in 2001. “The program is designed to give communities, organizations, and individuals the opportunity to stimulate dialogue through TED-like experiences at the local level.

“With a license for a Corporate Event, corporations can organize private, employees-only [TEDx] events ... to highlight ideas within corporations and to foster a culture of passion, inspiration, and collaboration—to enable employees to step outside of their daily routine and be inspired.”

A closer look at TED could inspire you to think outside your day job, too. Here are five big ideas that might help you think about your meetings in a new way.

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