Few of us have mottoes, but Temple University associate professor Chris Pavlides did.

It was “networking for life,” and last month I wrote about the nonprofit he founded around the concept.

The Greater Philadelphia Senior Executive Group expanded from five or six people meeting face-to-face monthly in 2002 to more than 1,000 members this year. Pavlides said he thought executives who’d climbed the ladder needed a forum where they could share opportunities.

“The world is very finicky,” he told me, referring to waves of corporate belt-tightening. “What stays with you is your network.”

Pavlides was killed in a one-car crash on Route 322 in Concord Township Tuesday morning. Word of his death spread fast.

“He organized executives, he connected the school to business people, and the students loved him,” said Fox School of Business dean M. Moshe Porat in a statement.

Roy Hibberd, vice chairman of the Greater Philadelphia Senior Executive Group, called Pavlides its spark.

“What Chris started, to his extreme credit, attracted a lot of people interested in helping others,” he said, adding that the group will go on and “flourish.”

“Its seed has been planted in very fertile soil,” said Hibberd, general counsel for Dollar Financial Corp.

Hibberd said that Pavlides “walked the walk” when it came to networking. Now those he inspired will have to walk it without him.

More Perp Walks

Let’s consider the practice of white-collar criminal defense a growth business.

The Obama administration announced Tuesday the formation of an interagency Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force to build upon the Corporate Fraud Task Force created in 2002 in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom scandals.

Officials promise the more expansive task force will be more active. Not that the previous one was inactive. That Justice Department-led effort obtained 1,300 corporate fraud convictions, including more than 200 involving CEOs and presidents.

GlaxoSmithKline P.L.C. is halfway through a strategic effort to teach an elephant how to tap its inner gazelle.

With operations spanning 114 countries, a workforce of more than 101,000 people, and annual revenue of 24.35 billion pounds sterling (about $41 billion), GlaxoSmithKline is the elephant.

Despite spending billions on research and development, it hasn’t been very productive in bringing breakthrough drugs to market. So CEO Andrew Witty took a page from the biotechnology industry in 2008 and created small drug discovery teams.

The company calls them “discovery performance units.” Each of the 38 DPUs consists of between 15 and 70 people. Each team is focused on a particular disease or molecular pathway.

That may sound like just rearranging some desks, but here’s where that dose of sink-or-swim entrepreneurial energy comes in: Each DPU leader had to present a three-year plan and request funding from a 13-member Discovery Investment Board. That board consists of senior executives, such as R&D chairman Moncef Slaoui, and three external members from the venture capital and biotechnology realms.

Later this month, many of the DPU leaders will make progress reports to the investment board, including John Lepore, who heads the Heart Failure DPU based in Upper Merion.

Slaoui told reporters visiting the company’s suburban Philadelphia operations that the goal is not simply to act like a nimbler organization. It’s to double the 2006 output of its R&D efforts by 2015 with the same resources.

To do that, GlaxoSmithKline executives say the company is “re-personalizing” its R&D apparatus. “Discovering a medicine is not a process,” Slaoui said. “It’s a judgment.”

GlaxoSmithKline expects Lepore and the other DPU leaders to use their intuition about pursuing the best new ideas. Lepore said he knows he’s accountable for his team’s progress, that he could be “called to the carpet” for missing milestones. But he didn’t sound too worried about his DPU’s upcoming review.

Halfway through the DPU experiment, it’s too soon to say whether it will be more productive. But Slaoui sees signs it’s working. GlaxoSmithKline has 19 compounds in Phase IIB or III development now compared with only eight in 2006.

Listening to the rhetoric about how the federal government needs to spend big to make sure the U.S. stays on technology’s cutting edge, I wonder if big carrots are better than baby ones.

Over the last 26 years, Pennsylvania’s Ben Franklin Technology Partners program has done a lot with a little state money. Mark Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association, recently praised the program, which provides young technology firms with small investments to nudge them ahead to where a venture capital firm may want to invest.

Other states who’d rushed to copy Ben Franklin when it was created in 1983 tended to shut down their programs when the governorship changed, Heesen said. Not Pennsylvania, which has continued to nurture home-grown tech firms. Ben Franklin has survived three Republican and two Democratic administrations even as its funding has expanded or contracted during budgetary feasts or famines.

This year, the four nonprofit centers that receive Ben Franklin funds, including one based at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, saw their total allocation cut to $16 million from $27.6 million last year. That may not be famine, but some technology companies will go hungry this year.

So we’ll see fewer announcements like Monday’s in which Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania said it invested a total of $950,000 in five companies. I wrote about one of them two weeks ago - Innova Materials L.L.C., an advanced materials company based in West Philadelphia, which got $225,000.

Ben Franklin invested in two firms in the “cleantech” sector, which has nothing to do with killing germs, but rather energy efficiency. CogniPower L.L.C. , of Malvern, received $200,000, to develop its method of monitoring current in power converters. BuLogic Inc., of Philadelphia, received $150,000 to work on wireless control systems for energy conservation.

Fort Washington-based ListenLogic L.L.C. got $250,000 to follow $125,000 that Ben Franklin injected earlier this year. The firm tracks tweets, blogs, and other online forums to let businesses know what’s being said about them.

Finally, Snipi Inc., of Center City, which is using a social media platform to try to make online shopping easier, received $125,000.

Whatever happened to the “cash for clunkers”-like program for new energy-efficient appliances?

Readers have called or e-mailed regularly about the planned $300 million federal rebate program that was included in the Obama economic stimulus package. Several callers with heating systems that are kaput have had particular urgency in their voices and don’t want to miss out on any rebate.

Unlike the $3 billion clunkers rebate blitzkrieg that boosted new-vehicle sales last summer, this program has proceeded more slowly and is aimed at longer-term household investments. It’s also being run differently, with each state deciding what kind of equipment will qualify for rebates.

The federal Department of Energy said last summer that only residential appliances that carry the Energy Star designation would qualify for a rebate. It suggested that rebates could be applied to water heaters, refrigerators, central air conditioners and other big-ticket appliances.

After talking with several people familiar with the program, it now appears details will be released by the end of the year on exactly the types of equipment each state will include in its rebate program as well as the amount of the rebates.

Last month, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection said its PA Energy Equipment Rebate Program would cover only non-electrical heating, air conditioning and water heating equipment. In other words, new energy-efficient equipment must use natural gas, propane or oil.

Pennsylvania hopes to make the $10.9 million in federal funds it receives available for rebates by March. The Rendell administration estimated that it could fund 32,000 heating, ventilation and air conditioning installations. That would amount to an average rebate of about $340.

New Jersey, which is getting $8.33 million in federal funding, released some details on its plans in late October. For example, the rebate for specified Energy Star dishwashers would range from $25 to $75 and for refrigerators from $75 to $100. The state Board of Public Utilities said the rebates are tentatively scheduled to be offered beginning in January.

If your heater’s dead, obviously you can’t wait until January to replace it. But even if replacing it now might not qualify for a rebate, you may be eligible for a federal tax credit for energy-efficient equipment. You can read more about such tax credits on the federal Energy Star Web site here.

There is a crush of business events in the next 10 days trying to beat the Thanksgiving holiday.

No fewer than four conferences preaching to very different audiences will test the attention-spans of those in attendance: They last all day; one spans two days.

Today, the 6th annual Wharton Marketing Conference is hoping to attract 500 students, faculty and marketing experts to the Park Hyatt Philadelphia. The spin for this daylong, student-run conference begins at 8:30 a.m. Expect new technology and the rotten economy to be the themes running through everyone’s PowerPoint.

Monday and Tuesday bring the region’s biotechnology industry to the Convention Center for Biotech 2009. Thirty-seven companies will get their 15 minutes to claim the attention of potential partners and investors. It is the ninth year for this event assembled by the industry organizations Pennsylvania Bio and BioNJ.

The 2nd Founder Factory kicks into gear on Thursday at World Cafe Live, 3025 Walnut St., starting at 10 a.m. Organized by Philly Startup Leaders, this event is all about start-up success stories in the Philadelphia area and words of wisdom from those who’ve made it. Call it one part beauty contest (discussion of new business concepts), one part reality check (seeking financing).

Next Friday, Wharton students are back in charge with their Wharton Finance Conference 2009 with cheery theme of “Looking Forward: Finance in a New Horizon” at the Park Hyatt starting at 7:30 a.m. Of the panel discussions planned, “Corporate Social Responsibility vs. Government Regulation” has the most provocative title. But for the Wharton students, “Careers in Finance: Recruiting in a Tough Economic Environment” will likely be the one not to miss.

After all of that, bring on the turkey.

Quotable

It is not by any means an endorsement. In addition to the reforms that help reduce costs, there are also provisions being considered that have real and serious risks of increasing costs.

- John Castellani, president of the Business Roundtable, discussing the group’s encouragement of lawmakers to keep working on ways to cut health-care costs.

My 401(k) statement may look a little better than it did at the end of last year, but I’m not feeling any kind of “wealth effect.”

Sure, the S&P 500 index is up 21 percent in 2009. If such a spike happened in any other year, I and investors like me would be ecstatic, running with the bulls on Wall Street. Why isn’t my “investor sentiment” feeling the love?

Because the stock market panic last fall that produced a 38 percent decline in the S&P 500 index for 2008 reflected a global financial crisis that toppled huge, ill-understood financial giants and spawned an ongoing debate over how to minimize the risk of its happening again.

Even so, unlike during the Great Depression, in which an entire generation soured on stocks, today’s investors have continued to stash money in their retirement accounts. However, many no longer have blind faith in the wealth-generating engineers who were entrusted with their hard-earned income.

Only about half of Americans who work for employers that provide 401(k) or other employee-contribution plans actually participate in them. The Obama administration and lawmakers would like to see more people save for retirement, but a double-digit unemployment rate and pressure on household budgets are deterrents to that.

Various surveys have shown that those who do participate in a 401(k) plan kept doing so during 2008, although with smaller contributions on average. A Vanguard Group Inc. report examined the actions of more than three million participants in more than 2,200 defined-contribution plans. On average, Vanguard found participants deferred 7 percent of their income into their 401(k)s in 2008 compared with 7.3 percent in 2007.

For families, the paper losses in their retirement accounts were unnerving. The Employee Benefit Research Institute estimated that the median balance for a defined-contribution plan was $26,578 as of mid-June, down 16.4 percent from the end of 2007.

I asked Chip Addis, president of Addis & Hill Inc., a Wayne financial-planning firm, whether he thought this broad market turmoil and loss of wealth were any different from the carnage caused by the technology-stock bubble that burst earlier this decade.

He said his conversations with investors indicated a big difference. The dot-com bubble and the terror attacks in 2001 were specific events, giving investors a way to “rationalize” their losses, he said.

“This time, it was all so confusing. It’s still confusing for people,” Addis said.

Worse, it was confusing to the financial industry that created and sold the complex derivatives that led to the massive global rescue by so many governments.

“The financial-services industry has done a poor job in dealing with issues of risk management, and of really educating the general public that these catastrophes can happen,” Addis said.

Looking ahead, investors need to watch how the various financial-oversight, health-care, and climate-change bills play out in Washington. Carrying massive amounts of debt, the federal government faces a huge hurdle in trying to sell evermore Treasury securities to nervous global investors in 2010. And while interest rates and inflation are low now, how long can they remain so?

It’s no wonder Addis said investors were still afraid. The United States may be more than a year removed from the disastrous events of September 2008, but the memory of those losses remains very fresh.

QVC Inc., e-commerce juggernaut?

Seems so. QVC, the television shopping network based in West Chester, has long had an online presence with its QVC.com.

But looking at the latest financial results for its parent company, Liberty Media Corp. , it’s clear that QVC.com isn’t just a sideline portal for the 24/7 electronic retailer.

Twenty-eight percent of QVC’s U.S. sales in the third quarter, or $1.09 billion, came through its dot-com business. That’s up from 24 percent last year.

Mike George, president and chief executive officer of QVC, told financial analysts on a conference call Monday that the company’s internal goal is to generate half of its sales from QVC.com by 2014.

“I don’t think that’s a crazy goal,” George said. “I think that’s a reasonable stretch goal.”

Overall sales for QVC in the third quarter rose to $1.67 billion from $1.64 billion a year ago, halting a four-quarter slide in sales. George said the company saw a 9 percent increase in the number of new customers in the quarter - the highest rate in the last seven years.

Consumer electronics and beauty products have become the biggest sales gainers for QVC as jewelry and apparel remain soft. George did note that the rate of decline in jewelry sales has moderated.

After the recessioninduced sales swoon during last year’s holiday shopping season, most retailers took steps to cut inventory and manage costs better in 2009. Last November, QVC announced plans to lay off 900 people. About 250 lost their jobs when QVC closed its West Chester call center last spring.

George told analysts, “We feel reasonably clean going into the holidays with the ability to chase goods if the sales are there.”

As it is for nearly all retailers, the fourth quarter represents some of the most important shopping weeks of the year. Unlike Macy’s and Wal-Mart, QVC doesn’t mind if holiday shoppers stay home, watch TV, and surf the Internet instead of hitting the shopping malls.

Last year around this time, those connected with the Philadelphia area's venture capital industry were worried along with the rest of us.

Markets were falling. The federal government was rescuing major financial institutions. The economy was teetering.

KPMG L.L.P., which conducts a survey with the annual Mid-Atlantic Capital Conference in Philadelphia, found a very dark mood. Venture firms, which always want to fund the growth and expansion of new companies, were instead planning to cut costs at those companies, said Brian Hughes, a KPMG partner based in Philadelphia.

Just as two straight quarters of positive gross domestic product growth in 2009 have indicated contraction has ended, so too this year's KPMG survey shows a brighter outlook by the venture capital world.

The survey of about 300 Philadelphia-area venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and professional advisors found that 87 percent of respondents expect total venture capital investment to increase in 2010, up from 32 percent last year.

For the second straight year, the No. 1 industry sector to put money to work is expected to be "cleantech," which encompasses companies involved in areas such as energy efficiency and alternative fuels. Perhaps that should come as no surprise because that's an emphasis of the Obama administration's economic stimulus effort as well.

Venture firms are profit-making enterprises out to put their money to work in what they hope will be fast-growing businesses. They raise money mainly from institutional investors, such as pension funds and endowments.

While everyone loves a good success story of venture-backed home runs like Google, eBay and even Staples, more common are the singles and doubles - companies that may get acquired or go public but never reach household-name status.

In fact, that's how venture firms make money for their limited partners. They have to "exit" with an initial public offering or engineer the sale of an investment. And that's been a problem for nearly two years.

Mark G. Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association, said last week that he's very concerned about the state of the industry. A shakeup has been underway as those venture firms that were formed during the dot-com bubble era are reaching a point in their development where they need to be finding ways to return capital to their limited partners.

A healthy equity market produces 85 to 100 IPOs a year, according to Heesen. Only six venture-backed companies went public in 2008, and there've been just 10 venture-backed IPOs so far this year.

The KPMG survey asked about the barriers to going public, and Hughes said the biggest hurdle is lack of investor appetite for IPOs. With the M&A activity beginning to pick up, that alternative has been more attractive to venture firms.

Still 88 percent of those surveyed predict GDP growth of between 0 and 5 percent in 2010, compared with the negative GDP predictions of last year, said Hughes, who is co-leader of KPMG's venture capital practice.

Meanwhile, 53 percent of the respondents are now looking to inject new capital into companies as they begin to hire and plan for expansion in 2010, Hughes said.

After a year of watching business run for cover, consider these signs that 2010 may be a little better those trying to build and grow companies.

Based on the discounting that already seems to be going on at stores, it already looks like another rough holiday shopping season for many retailers.

That’s true even for retailers that want to sell you things so you can make gifts for your kin, such as A.C. Moore Arts & Crafts Inc.

The Berlin, N.J., company last week reported a decline in comparable-store sales of 7.7 percent. Management was disappointed, but noted that one industrywide survey indicated a 9 percent drop in the overall consumption of arts and crafts products.

The company reported a wider net loss of $12.9 million, or 53 cents per share, for its quarter ended Oct. 3. Its stock price fell the most among those of local companies last week, falling 22.8 percent to close at $3.69.

A.C. Moore cited heavy discounting on seasonal merchandise by other retailers, with some markdowns hacking 50 percent off the regular price.

“While our consumer confidence may arguably be slowly improving, it appears certain that discretionary income spending is still lagging behind general household spending,” said Rick Lepley, president and CEO of A.C. Moore, on a conference call with financial analysts.

For the last three years, Lepley has been leading a turnaround of the 134-store chain that competes with Michaels Stores Inc. and Jo-Ann Stores Inc. “We continue to think that we’re in a stronger position to take advantage of increased consumer spending when it occurs,” he said.

But “when” is the key word. Will the consumer spend money this Christmas? Or Valentine’s Day? Anyone want to guess back-to-school?

Earnings

Today: American Water Works, BMP Sunstone, Lannett, Stonemor Partners;

Tomorrow: Astea International, Pep Boys - Manny, Moe & Jack;

Wednesday: Amerigas Partners, UGI;

Thursday: Quigley, SL Industries, Urban Outfitters.

Quotable

We expected a challenging second half. We baked into our plans and budgets, and that’s exactly what we got.

- Cristobal Conde, president and chief executive officer of Wayne-based SunGard Data Systems Inc., on a call with analysts Friday.