Strategy for (dealing with) Growth

Posted on January 5, 2010 by Bill Petti

Joel Spolsky, an entrepreneur and columnist for Inc., wrote an interesting piece last month asking whether his strategy of slow, consistent growth was actually a recipe for failure: I have always believed that there is a natural, organic rate at which a business should grow, and that if we expanded too fast, the wheels would [...]

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billpetti.com | Top Posts for 2009

Posted on January 4, 2010 by Bill Petti

As everyone seems to be offering up their year-end selection of top posts I figured I might as well join the chorus.  So here is an annotated list of the top 20 posts at billpetti.com (at least in terms of page views) for 2009.  Thanks again to everyone that stopped by: Piracy as a Signal [...]

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The Network: WSJ on Raj Rajaratnam

Posted on December 30, 2009 by Bill Petti

A little post-Christmas cold has thrown a wrench in my plans to catch up on posting.  In the meantime, be sure to check out the current series on Galleon and its founder, Raj Rajaratnam, in the Wall Street Journal.  The Galleon case is the largest insider-trading case brought by Federal prosecutors in many years.  Rajaratnam [...]

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Too Big to Fail

Posted on December 24, 2009 by Bill Petti

I just started reading Andrew Ross Sorkin’s highly acclaimed history of the recent financial meltdown. I am only three chapters in, but I can already recommend the book to all. This book is not written in a highly technical style. Instead, Sorkin discusses complex financial instruments and concepts with ease in a highly accessible manner.  [...]

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Brands, Knock-offs, and Conspicuous Consumption: Some Experimental Findings

Posted on December 7, 2009 by Bill Petti

Bloomberg.com links to two fascinating studies, both authored by Renne Richardson Gosline who teaches marketing at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, that investigated a number of issues related to luxury goods and knock-offs. The first study, “Rethinking Brand Contamination” (link to PDF), examined to what extent consumers can spot counterfeit or knock-off versions of luxury [...]

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Sovereign Debt: The Next Financial Contagion?

Posted on November 28, 2009 by Bill Petti

This week, the government of Dubai decided to delay payment on the tens of billions of dollars that it’s Dubai World holding owes to various creditors (UBS speculates as much as $80B).  Dubai World is the vehicle through which the state has invested heavily in various real estate projects around the world.  In order to [...]

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Oldschool Social Networking

Posted on November 26, 2009 by Bill Petti

Today’s Wall Street Journal includes an interesting article about the Wednesday 10 group–a network of (at the time) up and coming businessmen in New York that was formed in 1957.  The group was the brainchild of former columnist William Safire, and the article coincides with the group’s first meeting since his passing.  The rationale for [...]

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Visualizing my Social Network

Posted on August 24, 2009 by Bill Petti

I’ve been getting more interested in data visualization lately (as you might have picked up by some of my recent posts). I do not have the technical skills required for really insightful, visually impressive work at this point. Thankfully, Nate at FlowingData pointed me in the direction of IBM’s Many Eyes project, which allows you [...]

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