Last fall, we joined several of our Motley Fool Rule Breakers teammates on a week-long "innovation tour" through Silicon Valley, where we met with executives at Exelixis, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), VMware , and several other Rule Breakers companies.

We also had the pleasure of meeting with Silicon Valley legends Guy Kawaski -- an early software evangelist for Apple -- and venture capitalist Bill Gurley -- who served as lead analyst on the Amazon IPO.

But perhaps our most interesting meeting was with another man who is no doubt familiar to just about everyone in the business world ...

We watched him work his magic on a touch-sensitive PC that we're still salivating over. We got a closer look at one of the two local eateries that he owns. We even got firsthand details on his new book.

Then we struck a nerve
Little did we know, his passion for personal finance is matched only by his utter disdain for stocks. You see, this keen observer of business and management trends believes that most people, himself included, cannot beat the market buying individual stocks, especially when the companies behind those stocks are run by drunken chimpanzees.

It's a fair point: Drunken chimps can't do much. Yet, according to finance professor Kenneth French -- one-half of the team that revealed the market-beating potential of small-cap value stocks -- investors paid $99.2 billion in fees trying to beat the market during 2006 and were on pace to spend more than $100 billion in 2008.

Confusing the confusopolies
And that doesn't even address today's business climate. First there were meltdowns at Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and AIG (NYSE: AIG). Then came a record year for dividend cuts and suspensions that burned investors in everything from Freeport-McMoRan (NYSE: FCX), to Genworth Financial (NYSE: GNW), to News Corp (Nasdaq: NWS).

So, it's not hard to see why Dilbert creator Scott Adams quips that Dogbert, CEO of Confusopoly Corp . (TICKER: HUH), could convince the world's bankers that an active market for commercial paper would melt Greenland. Or that ritual cat sacrifices are the key to saving America's auto industry.

Laugh all you want, but bankers at Merrill Lynch, Citigroup (NYSE: C), and elsewhere are the same Harvard-stupid morons who thought that credit derivatives weren't all that risky. Who's to say they wouldn't believe a cartoon character? Or that they wouldn't find synergies between CDOs and cat sacrifices? They're eerily similar, after all -- both begin with the letter "c."

Bottom line, Adams told us that his severe distrust of weasels -- er, management -- is the main reason for his swearing off individual stocks. Makes sense to us. Investors were right to distrust the optimists at Las Vegas Sands (NYSE: LVS), among others.

So, what should you do?
Adams gave us nine steps that he says, when performed in order, can help you to generate (and protect) wealth. We think his suggestions are pretty Foolish, and thus, with his permission (thanks, Scott), we publish them here:

You're not in Elbonia anymore, Dilbert
Adams' nine steps look pretty familiar to us Fools; we've always advocated paying off debt, saving for retirement, and having a substantial emergency fund. But avoid stocks altogether? We respectfully disagree. Continued...