-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- The Front Lines column on the Marketplace page in Today's WSJ: http://interactive3.wsj.com/edition/current/articles/FrontLines.htm May 23, 1997 Entrepreneurs Become Leaders In the New World, Flores Says I FIRST HEARD the name Fernando Flores... Before I had the chance to check out the guy, I received an e-mail from a former top Air Force general. He mentioned he had been deeply influenced by a philosopher, business consultant and onetime political prisoner named Fernando Flores. How often do you see those descriptions on the same resume? ... Trained as an engineer, at age 28 he became finance minister in the Marxist regime of Salvador Allende in 1970. .... THEN, IN 1973, ... Mr. Flores spent three years in prison brooding over the notion of computers for communication rather than computation. ... When Amnesty International and others won his release in 1976 ... - From the German philosopher Martin Heidegger he learned ... "A human society," as he puts it, "operates through the expression of requests and promises." A business, likewise, is a collection of simultaneous conversations, and every conversation involves an act of commitment. ... Working with the computer scientist Terry Winograd, he created a product to transform computer workstations from solitary appliances into devices for tracking commitments between workers. ... "groupware." ... IF DR. FLORES becomes famous for anything, it may be for a concept of entrepreneurialism he has described in a forthcoming book from MIT Press called "Disclosing New Worlds," co-authored with the philosophers Charles Spinosa and Hubert Dreyfus. In a time of vapid values and insipid politics, they say entrepreneurs are becoming the leaders of the world. While the typical capitalist merely forecasts human needs, they argue, "the entrepreneur is the person who determines which needs will seem important." ...... DCF -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 5.0 beta Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBM4Wh7oVO4r4sgSPhAQGe/QQAy1BF4zBPwRev/0YsUaijy9EGYy09PpYl tiDxAmzV/cH2zQO5ni3zRgS9gnpElCzud3gsMzyG1oXJhE29qC/MGRsg8HIAf49r op9WZE2ERchIQKO1wjDnsNXxMDlhy6/z9vLcdGyyvacjaQTF8xA8a/OOvlF6Bi44 Z2Yyg5ixSdU= =brqU -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----