Alumni & Student Stories

Meteorologist with a Message:
Effective Writing a Factor in Winning $30 Million in Contracts

Richard Carlson, M.A. Organizational Psychology, 2004

The way meteorologist Richard Carlson sees it, it’s hard to prepare for everything in life, so it’s best to prepare for as much as possible. Carlson has had
plenty of experience dealing with people and setting up businesses. At one point or another, he has contracted with major airports in the nation to provide weather service. It’s a career that began for him in the Air Force. He has been a meteorologist since 1976 and he started his own company in 1988.

He's a man with a remarkable range of experience. At one point in his career, he worked from the international terminal at Kennedy Airport in New York, where he provided in-route flight weather information for 700 international flights daily. His next career move took him to an office at an abandoned U.S. Navy airport in rural Quillayute, Wash., where one morning he woke to the distant call of a Roosevelt elk that was crossing a lonely runway in the mist.

Now Carlson’s office is in the control tower at Sea-Tac International Airport. He was awarded the contract at Sea-Tac in December 1999, when he still worked out of Quillayute, contracting weather services at almost every major airport on the West Coast.

"We took over operations at Sea-Tac and I moved my office from Quillayute to Seattle on the first day of the WTO riots," he says. Carlson was there Feb. 28, 2001, when the Nisqually earthquake left the Sea-Tac control tower practically in ruins.

"That was a little too chaotic for me," he says. Shattered glass from the tower rained down on his office, embedding sheets of glass four feet wide and an inch thick in the ceiling a few feet above him.

"That experience moved me to accomplish some things I had long wished to do. I realized that time could be abruptly cut short," Carlson says.

Antioch pivotal to his career

He had been interested in completing a graduate degree for quite awhile. His decision to come to Antioch turned out to be more than a little fortuitous — it has become pivotal to his career.

"Antioch gives me a context for creative thinking. Organizational psych seemed like another way to be prepared for what happened," he says.

So … what happened? In his first semester, Carlson took a class in effective professional writing taught by Kristin Woolever, who was then director of the Center for Creative Change.

"Antioch gives me a context for creative thinking."Carlson was gearing up to write a contract proposal aimed at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to provide weather service for all major U.S. airports. It was an elaborate proposal that involved a team of 12 small businesses that together hoped to win 25 contracts with the FAA and the National Weather Service.

As he prepared his section of the proposal, Carlson shared his writing with Antioch class members, who offered critiques along the way. His part alone took six weeks to write. He describes the size of his document by holding his hands a full two feet apart. “It was literally that thick," he says.

Carlson was pleased he had the foresight to take that class in effective professional writing at Antioch. Still, preparedness wasn’t totally in his control with this complex project proposal. By the time all the pieces were in, the FAA proposal filled eight huge boxes and, yes, the proposal was due the day it was completed. The team was in Philadelphia. The FAA offices were in Washington, D.C. Several team members took off by car from Philadelphia in pouring rain around noontime, hoping to make it to D.C. by the 3 p.m. deadline.

Traffic was a crawl, especially when they reached the D.C. area, although that was only the first hurdle, Carlson says. When they arrived at the FAA, with just a minute to spare, he started to unload the boxes. One box collapsed from the weight of its contents, he says, and a flurry of pages swirled in the air on that fateful, windy, rainy day.

Then another box broke

"It’s only for the grace of a tourist who helped me gather them that we managed to get in the door in time," he describes. “Then we had to contend with building security. As we got through security, another box broke."

When they arrived at the office to deliver the proposal, the door was locked. At first they were told they were too late. Eventually, FAA officials decided that for the proposal to be accepted, Carlson’s team would have to collect a signed affidavit from one of the security guards at the building entrance to attest that they had walked in the building before the deadline. They returned to the entrance, only to discover it was shift-change time.

Carlson, naturally, is rolling his eyes as he tells this whole story. Would they find a guard who’d been there and who was willing to sign on the dotted line for them so the proposal would be accepted? Well, yes, otherwise this would be a tale without much of an ending.

"In the beginning, this contract proposal appeared to be overwhelming. How could we keep something like this a small business?

“Being attached to outcomes is difficult and the outcome in this instance was very precarious, so I was trying to prepare myself for it either way," Carlson says.

Thank-you note for writing class

Months later, Carlson’s team received more than $30 million in FAA and National Weather Service contracts. For Carlson, this meant signing on 60 new employees. It also moved him to write a thank-you note to Kristin Woolever for the writing class she taught.

As he finished work on his master’s degree at Antioch, Carlson also managed weather stations with state-of-the-art quality assurance and stepped up the level of oversight that he says needs to be a part of his profession.

Perhaps you’re wondering how a high-powered meteorologist fit in with the Antioch culture?

"Antioch has a culture that is well-suited to my temperament," he says. "In my studies, I married the perspectives of creative change, creativity and spirituality. Antioch is especially conducive and very nourishing to that style of learning."