(Copyright (c) 1997, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

THEN, IN 1973, the military seized the presidential palace. President Allende lost his life. Mr. Flores was jailed. Cybersyn went nowhere, and Mr. Flores spent three years in prison brooding over the notion of computers for communication rather than computation. "I wanted to be a force in that," he says today.
When Amnesty International and others won his release in 1976, he exiled himself (with five kids in tow) to Stanford University. His wife, Gloria, wrapped airline sandwiches for Marriott. His teenage children pitched in their Burger King wages. And Mr. Flores threw himself into doctoral studies intent on investigating communication at the most fundamental level: by asking what it means to be human.
From the German philosopher Martin Heidegger he learned that existence arises from interaction. Studying the theory of "speech acts," he realized that language always conveys not merely information but commitment. And soon a light bulb went off: "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. ("Can you do this?" "I will pay that amount.") In this "network of commitments," everyone is a customer, a provider, or both at once. Thus, where computers are concerned, "You should not track information, you should track commitments."
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. The system, called the Coordinator, ushered in a generation of collaboration programs known as work-flow tools, or "groupware." Some users found the system dogmatic, but its success left Dr. Flores fixed for life.

To further commercialize his theory of business process, he launched a consulting practice called Business Design Associates, based in Alameda, Calif. Although it conducts no marketing, BDA in seven years has reached nearly $30 million in annual billings. (You'll read about BDA's methods in next Friday's column.) 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."
Dr. Flores says he hopes for nothing less than entrepreneurs one day "overcoming the classical distinction between left and right that has dominated the world since the French Revolution."
True entrepreneurs, he says, aren't motivated solely or even principally by money. Profit is essential, of course -- even a onetime Marxist can see that -- but generating a return on capital is no more the objective of business than having competent employees or loyal customers. "We compete to make things, and ourselves, more worthy," the book says. Profit is but a step in a process by which entrepreneurs attain identities.