When David Guzmán steps back from his job as CIO of medical-supplies distributor Owens & Minor Inc. and wonders how he got there, he can point to an unusually volatile career-defining moment: brawls with his uncle.

Guzmán grew up in a family of migrant farm workers from Puerto Rico who settled in southern New Jersey when he was a young boy. After a childhood of hard knocks that included a single-mother household, persistent welfare, the death of an infant brother, and a grueling job at a textile mill when he was just 12 years old, Guzmán emerged with a tenacity that got him into Yale University on an academic scholarship. But during his college years, he didn't quite get the family support he expected.

"I had fistfights with my uncle because I had, in his words, 'pajaritos de ambicion en tu cabeza,' or 'little birds of ambition in my head,'" Guzmán recalls. His uncle believed that Guzmán's going to college effectively meant that he had turned his back on the family that needed his healthy young body to make ends meet.

Guzmán toughed out those fights and earned an economics degree. But after starting a Ph.D. program, he got a call from his mother, asking for $20. He went home and discovered, to his horror, that there was essentially no food in the kitchen. It was at that moment he opted to come home and enter the workforce. "My uncle was right," he says. "I mean, he wasn't right, but he was right."

For Guzmán, what matters is how things turned out. Since taking the CIO post at Owens & Minor in 2000, he's led an IT-powered company transformation. "It's always been the business side of technology that's excited me," he says. "I'm an applied-technology guy. It excites me to make money."

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