Pete Carlson
Senior Associate
carlson@futureworksweb.com

Pete has twenty-seven years of experience in consulting, research, and policy analysis. For the past five years, his work has focused on helping regions develop strategies and build partnerships that align workforce development and economic development to promote economic growth and opportunity. As part of that work, he has conducted in-depth studies of over a dozen regions, exploring what approaches they are taking to grow their economies, where the leadership is coming from for those efforts, and how workforce issues are being addressed as part of that process. He has also organized and conducted three national roundtables of regional leaders and experts doing work in this area.

Pete's consulting work has also focused on helping organizations work through complex problems to improve their performance in a number of industries, but particularly in auto and health care. In the course of that work, he has partnered with a number of prominent consultants using a variety of different approaches, giving him experience in applying the principles and tools of total quality management, organizational learning, appreciative inquiry, system dynamics, lean manufacturing, and complexity science to help organizations make breakthroughs in their performance. He has also managed collaborative networks of leading-edge companies to explore what makes the biggest difference in improving performance and transforming organizations. It is his skill and experience in applying the appropriate principles and tools to the unique and changing circumstances of each situation that define his consulting practice.

Prior to his consulting practice, Pete served as an advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Labor on strategies to promote high-performance work organizations. As the director of the National Advisory Commission on Work-Based Learning, comprised of business and labor leaders, he organized forums of leading experts and practitioners to identify what was working and what was getting in the way of spreading the adoption of total quality management and employee involvement, and improving the skills of the American workforce.

Earlier, Pete evaluated federal employment policies at the National Council on Employment Policy. He later analyzed economic trends and workplace developments for the National Alliance of Business. During his time at NAB, he staffed a national commission co-chaired by former Secretaries of Labor Ray Marshall and Bill Brock that studied the impact of global competition on American industries and American jobs, and what it would take to compete successfully in global markets, leading to the report, "America's Choice: High Skills or Low Wages."

In 2005, Pete staffed a reprise of that commission, updating its analysis and recommendations to take into account the changing dynamics of global competition, taking an in-depth look at the changing competitive landscape in a number of industries, and analyzing the implications of those changes for American jobs, as background research for the report, "Tough Choices or Tough Times."