He has the charm of a polished street performer, the smile of an expert fund raiser.

As founder of The KaosPilots, the world's most adventurous alternative business school, Uffe Elbaek also has the imagination of an educational visionary. Based in Aarhus, Denmark and backed by companies such as Apple, LEGO, SAS, Carlsberg, and Nova Norsk, The KaosPilots is a three-year management training program designed to provide 30 Scandinavian students per "flight" with the skills they need to succeed in a rapidly changing, unpredictable economic environment.

"Society is moving from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy," says Elbaek, 42. "But the old business schools haven't made the transition. They still have a golf-club culture. We want to prepare young people to navigate in chaotic systems, to see change as an opportunity."

Elbaek launched The KaosPilots in 1991 on a wing and a prayer -- and a $100,000 loan. What began as only "a picture of an idea" has rapidly evolved into an international learning experience: this August, students in their second year of the program will travel to San Francisco for a year of "learning by doing."

Aarhus, home of The Kaos Pilots and Denmark's second-largest city, likes to think of itself as the San Francisco of Scandinavia, with its concentration of universities and a central city marked by block after block of coffee houses and cafés. And the exterior of the group's headquarters looks like something out of the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during the flower-power days of the 1960s.

But inside is a scene from the future, not the past. The mind-set of The KaosPilots displays itself in the design of the space. Instead of a standard reception desk, a sheared-off metal airplane wing juts out from a wall. Across from the wing is a full-sized wooden horse taken from an antique merry-go-round. In Elbaek's bright, spacious office are the kinds of artifacts you'd expect to find in a tony advertising agency: the latest Mac, colorful posters and irreverent cartoons, exposed brick walls, and wooden post-and-beam supports.

There are open classrooms with Mac-based workstations, and a Mac-equipped workroom where students are conscientiously developing their own software and games, and testing the latest CD-ROMs that have come into the Pilots' headquarters. Upstairs there's a library with business and techie magazines from around the world, and books and catalogs designed to keep the students plugged into the digital revolution.

One floor down is the headquarters of the Frontrunners, the program started by Elbaek in 1982 as a social experiment. Hired by the city to act as counselor/teacher for problem kids, Elbaek turned the job into a movement; it began with 5 kids, grew to 250, and finally involved the entire Aarhus community in street festivals and cultural activities.

"At the time I was fascinated by street theater and performances -- mime, stilts, juggling, clowning, and all the rest of it," Elbaek remembers. "I decided to turn the boys into a troupe of street performers. I finally got them to perform somersaults by convincing them that the girls would be crazy about them. They were no longer booed as dropouts and failures. They were applauded for their performances." Today Aarhus Festival Week is the largest annual cultural program in Scandinavia.