Salvador Allende meets Kevin Kelly

[Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>]

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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


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