(FORTUNE Magazine) – One computer program that helps people work together traces back to such disparate characters as Salvador Allende, Chile's late socialist president, and Werner Erhard, founder of est. These influences come together in a Chilean-born entrepreneur named Carlos Fernando Flores Labra, 44, whose company, Action Technologies, sells the Coordinator, one of the first of the new programs to reach the market. In his third year at Santiago's elite Catholic University, Flores married his childhood sweetheart, Gloria, and took an engineering job to support her and the first of their five children. Put in charge of engineers 20 years his senior, Flores worked days and studied at night, graduating at the top of his class in 1965. He had risen through a series of jobs by 1972 when Allende made the 29-year-old technocrat his economics minister, and later finance minister. Flores was captured when the army stormed the presidential palace on September 11, 1973. He was shipped to prison on Dawson Island, at Chile's desolate southernmost tip. ''We didn't know if he was dead or alive for the next ten months,'' Gloria Flores recalls. Detained without charges for three years, Flores sat out his imprisonment studying books on science and philosophy. His reading kept bringing his thoughts back to computers, which fascinated him but left him frustrated that the flood of data they spew forth overwhelms effective decision-making. After pressure from Amnesty International helped secure his release in 1976, Flores spent a year as a research associate at Stanford. Impoverished but determined to carve out a new life in exile, he enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Berkeley that allowed him to pursue his eclectic interests in philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. The family supplemented his meager fellowship with income Gloria earned wrapping sandwiches for airline meals and after-school jobs his children held at a local Burger King. Flores met Erhard at a conference in 1979, and the two formed a partnership to offer workshops embodying the decision-making principles Flores had devised at Berkeley. Though the partnership was dissolved in 1985, an Erhard company has a 20% stake in privately held Action Technologies and a seat on the board. The software company and workshops have made Flores a wealthy man, with an estimated net worth of $35 million to $40 million.