I participated in a market research focus group yesterday evening on the subject of Public Policy. I've been in these focus groups a number of times - perhaps you have as well. They gather generally small groups, like 8-12 folk, in a room and then they solicit opinions on a particular area of interest for a particular client to see how this fares in a group of people who might be their target audience. Over the years, I've been in groups discussing commercials that are played, we've had food studies with samples, one time it was a video game and they wanted us to beta test it for them for playability. Generally the pay is pretty good. Last night for two hours, the pay was $100. Sometimes, if it's a more technical topic, I've been paid up to $200 for maybe 2-3 hours. I've aged out of the target demographic of a number of market studies, but with this one, the topic was Public Policy and the group assembled had varying amounts of public involvement, but all had volunteered in some capacity for some organization or group.
The group didn't include any other Kossacks - yes, I dropped the Daily Kos name just to see if anyone reacted. This Public Policy study was introducing a series of topics that a potential, hypothetical new organization would follow as it sought to influence policies - we weren't told if the focus would be at a national, state or local level. They presented a variety of concepts and asked what did people like about the way the topic was introduced, how they saw this fitting in with the culture and whether the descriptions might make people likelier to want to get involved with the organization or not.
One of the first questions was a brief description of general platitudes - this unnamed and heretofore undescribed organization was interested in trying to get public involvement in a new organization. Some of the buzz words they used were "values" and "non-partisan" and they seemed to specifically want to avoid making any specifics. For how likely I'd want to get involved with an organization like that, I put only a 20% chance. I mean, I spend much of my extra time here on Kos, and the elections are starting to heat up. Without knowing who was backing this group and what values they had, I didn't figure I'd have much interest in getting involved.
One thing they did try and say early on was to describe why they were trying to avoid labels like Liberal and Conservative. The example they used for "Liberal" was that "Liberals tend to trust government and " I pointed out when it was my turn to speak that such a description about liberals generally trusting government was pretty off the mark and I listed as examples the government wiretapping, the rush for the TPP, the military spending, etc. The Conservative description was closer to my view of Conservatives, but it, too, was way too short and would piss off people rather than make them want to join in.
The areas of interest then began to get a bit more specific. They talked about environmental health, public health, education, immigration, community involvement. They had a proposal, for example, about increasing funding for health education, but were not specific about just what type of health education. They had a proposal about increasing financial literacy for the poor, as well as the idea of having everyone be given a chance for a 401K at work that they'd have to opt out of rather than opt in to. They had a mention about how Social Security and Medicare should be modified, but no specifics as to how. I wrote in the margins we need to expand SS and Medicare for all. They had a number of proposals about school vouchers - helping teachers at private schools with paying off loans for education, allowing tax monies to be used for vouchers, and many others. Since I'm against vouchers to take public monies and use them for private schools, especially if they're religious or set up to exclude kids because of economics or other weed-outs, I was pretty vocal in saying those kinds of activities would cause me to work against those proposals if this organization was trying to promote them. Their proposals on immigration included helping recent immigrants with classes for things like citizenship, learning English, learning how to drive and get drivers licenses, etc. Their proposals on incarceration were to decriminalize marijuana, fund re-entry programs to help prisoners transitioning out of prison as well as job training programs within the prisons.
As the evening went on, I became more and more certain that this sounded like some sort of Third Way or "No Labels" equivalent - corporations and billionaires looking to influence society in ways that they like, but which may not lift all people up and is likely to mean they control where the money goes while they keep the tax deductions away from the government where it stands at least a chance of going to people the billionaires might not approve of. They were crafting their pitch through our feedback. At the end of the evening, the moderator asked people to see if they could come up with a definition for the term "Principled Entrepreneurship". Most had problems with that, as it seems to indicate they're following something, but what? I said I thought it meant they had a series of guiding principles in their commerce, but that nothing said that their guiding principles were necessarily good ones - even substituting "ethical" wouldn't change anything. Some businesses have lousy ethics, and both words could be used to describe a money is the principle driving force for the business, or it could also describe organizations like non-profits that are out to help everyone. It's just not a useful term.
Then the moderator asked us if we had heard of people and he listed a number of names. The first one escaped me - I hadn't heard of it and since I'm lousy with names, it didn't stick with me. However, I'd heard of the next several: Charles Koch (uh, oh, major alarm bells), George Soros (yeah, heard of him, still waiting on my check), Bill Gates (everyone had heard of him) and I think there was a fifth name that I had heard of, but those three stood out. This does sound like a Third Way kind of project; all they needed was to throw Hillary and Bill's names in there and it would have completed it all (I'll let Obama leave office before he officially joins them).
At the end, we were asked if we might have more of an interest in working with such an organization now that we had a better idea of some of the possible areas they might focus on. I said I'd now give it a 35. I'm still not sold on it and I'm certainly not going to help a Charles Koch organization, no matter how nice their purported goals are.
Searching teh Google, they do have the term. From the Citadel university (well, we've put a lot of attention into South Carolina recently, so why not another view?)(oh, and since this is so short, I copied the whole thing - and I apologize in advance if this is not fair use - it just seemed like it was too short to really break down and I do urge people to reference the source as I have):
Their short white paper
A principled entrepreneur:
1. Makes decisions in the long-run best interest of the company based on facts, reality, and reason.
2. Creates win-win relationships with both customers and suppliers, engaging in exchanges that are in both the long-run best interests of the company and the customers and suppliers; and trading value for value in the marketplace.
3. Manages their employees in a manner that rewards productivity, holds people accountable and responsible, encourages independent thinking, and fosters teamwork and mutual respect.
4. Conducts business relationships with honesty, integrity, and lives up to the promises they make and contracts they enter into.
5. Respects and competes with other businesses in the marketplace by providing customers with higher value at lower costs.
A principled entrepreneur does not:
1. Seek to gain an advantage over their competition by using or supporting government policies that restrict competition in the marketplace or harm their competitors.
2. Seek or accept government subsidies or bailouts as the route to business success or survival.
3. Evade the facts of reality when making decisions.
4. Attempt to take advantage of their customers or suppliers, engage in deception or fraud, nor pursues short-run profits at the detriment of the long-run best interest of the company
I am sorry, but having an organization with Charles Koch involved that claims that it will not work to gain unfair advantages or seek to restrict competition just strikes me as worthy of a Chris Matthews "HA!". At most, it's the billionaires pulling up the ladders behind them as they espouse that they want everyone to succeed on a level playing field. It may be an element of the same style of blindness to their good fortune that in another field is called "White Privilege". The Billionaires and titans of industry don't recognize all that was done to allow them to succeed - they don't realize "they didn't build that".
Some more links from Google:
http://www.politicalcapitalism.org/...
http://www.theatlantic.com/...
There are more - the Koch Industries claims to use these principles. American Enterprise Institute also has documentation on it.
So, has anyone else heard the term "Principled Entrepreneurship" and is this the next project to mollify the masses while the TPP and other trade deals finish off the middle class? I guess I'm just especially jaded right now as the corporations seem like they're on one hell of a roll.