Some might think, after nine years as a risk analyst and hedge-fund manager, Jayant Khadilkar would want a job with a little more precision to it. Something so he wouldn’t always feel like he was milking a white cow in a blizzard. Engineering, maybe, or plumbing.

Not Khadilkar. At 42, he’s CEO of Raleigh-based Weather Predict Inc. “Forecasts are never 100% accurate,” he says. “What we’re offering is forecasts that are more consistent, more reliable than anyone else.”

They’re for customers from his old stomping grounds — stockbrokers, commodities traders and such. A hot summer with heavy air conditioning might drive up the price of utility shares. A fall hurricane could double plywood sales. “I never really left the financial world.”

Customers of Weather Predict, founded in 2000 in Tallahassee, Fla., pay fees — typically several thousand dollars a month — for forecasts that Khadilkar says are more accurate than free ones. Some also pay a share of the profits the forecasts earn them. The forecasts are based on a proprietary system developed at Florida State University and use a patented mathematical model. Customers have password access to their own Web sites, which are continually updated, and can get telephone consulting.

So far, Weather Predict has about 10 customers, including Raleigh-based National Gas Distributors. Khadilkar wants to expand by selling information to retailers and others whose profits are affected by the weather. “If you’re trading futures on, say, natural-gas prices, you want to know when the weather is turning colder. But companies like The Home Depot also need this information so they know where to allocate inventory in anticipation of a hurricane or blizzard.”

Born in Lonavala, India, the son of a civil engineer and a homemaker, he grew up in Pume, a city of 2.3 million about 115 miles east of Bombay. He came to the United States for graduate school and got a master’s in operations research from the University of Kentucky in 1986.

Khadilkar worked for Applied Insurance Research in Boston from 1989 to early 1994 as a risk analyst, then moved to Pembroke, Bermuda-based RenaissanceRe Holdings. The company sponsored research at Florida State University on tracking hurricanes. “All hurricane tracks within the three-day window are pretty much the same. We were trying to reach out beyond that 72-hour window.”

He left in 1998 to manage a hedge fund in Raleigh and, by 1999, saw a need in the financial market for weather data. “I contacted the professor at FSU I had met through Renaissance. I asked if there was any way to use the model he developed for hurricanes with everyday weather.” Answer: yes.

Khadilkar and another investor raised more than $2 million by the summer of 2000 and began business in a garage in Tallahassee. In 2001, he moved the operation to Raleigh, where he lives. It employs 14. He won’t reveal revenue but says the company will be profitable this year. Starting a business wasn’t scary. He and his wife had started Follow the Child Montessori School in Raleigh in 1999. Their two children are easy to spot: They always know when to wear their raincoats.

The name never has been quite accurate. Nonrevenue sports — the ones at colleges and universities that aren’t football and men’s basketball — usually have generated some money, just not very much. At most places, football and basketball pay the bills for baseball, softball, track and field, soccer, lacrosse, wrestling and other varsity sports.

Now athletic directors across North Carolina and the country have launched initiatives that they hope will make that name obsolete. They prefer another one, Olympic sports, though it’s not accurate either because neither golf nor lacrosse is played during the Olympics.

There’s reason for their optimism. When Dennis Thomas, the commissioner of Greensboro-based Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference, sat down to negotiate a TV contract with ESPN this year, he made an extra demand: Show sports other than football and basketball. “Before, that wasn’t done. You were just happy to get football, basketball and some women’s basketball.”

This time, he got his wish. When the network’s new cable channel, Charlotte-based ESPNU, devoted exclusively to college sports, signed a seven-year contract with the MEAC in February, it agreed to televise an undetermined number of softball, volleyball, baseball and track and field events. MEAC schools include North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro. Games also will appear on ESPN2 and ESPN Classic.

Why would ESPN care about the obscure MEAC? Well, it has to fill ESPNU’s schedule with something. The network launched in March, joining New York-based College Sports TV in broadcasting only college sports, particularly the nonrevenues. Neither channel is widely available. In fact, neither is offered on the primary cable systems in Charlotte or Raleigh. But if that changes, the two networks eventually could give much wider exposure to sports that typically have been ignored.

Chuck Gerber is executive vice president of ESPN Regional Television in Charlotte, which oversees programming on ESPNU. He says the new network, which plans to air about 300 sporting events a year, will help baseball, softball and lacrosse the most. “That kind of exposure can only help a university. It helps them attract athletes, attract alumni and raise money. If we grow the interest, it’s good for us and good for the institution.”

More TV coverage, however, is only one of the tactics that colleges and universities in the state are employing to boost Olympic sports. They also are offering promotions and giveaways, advertising in local newspapers, selling sponsorships in game programs and on signs at the field or arena and raising ticket prices.

N.C. State University spends nearly $100,000 a year to advertise games for baseball, women’s basketball, softball and other sports, says Charlie Cobb, associate athletics director. At East Carolina University in Greenville, the outfield wall is covered with sponsorship signs. And at women’s basketball games at UNC Chapel Hill, cheerleaders throw T-shirts and souvenir basketballs into the crowd.

Fans aren’t the only ones being targeted. The UNC Chapel Hill board of trustees has proposed hiking student athletics fees, part of which goes to the athletic department, from $98 per student to $248.

The school also increased ticket prices for men’s lacrosse and baseball, men’s and women’s soccer and women’s basketball. Those are the only secondary sports in which it charges admission, which increased from $4 to $5 for all events except women’s basketball, which went from $5 to $7. It also installed 300 seats with backs and cup holders near the floor of Carmichael Auditorium, where the women’s basketball team plays, and sold those for $10 a game. It will install more for next season. In mid-March, Beth Miller, senior associate athletic director for Olympic sports, said she couldn’t say yet how much the increases yielded. “But they’re so far away from becoming self-sustaining that’s not a realistic goal. Our main philosophy with Olympic sports is that we want to put people in the stands and have larger crowds more than it is to generate revenue. But we also want to generate revenue.”

Among state schools with more than 5,000 students, only UNC Greensboro reported a profit from Olympic sports in 2003-04, mostly due to strong baseball and soccer programs. Other North Carolina universities posted wide disparities between revenue and expenses. “If we were actually in the business to generate revenue from these sports, we would all be fired a year ago,” says Chris Kennedy, senior associate athletic director at Duke University.

Kennedy cites the Duke men’s lacrosse team as an example of the uphill battle schools face. Scholarships cost more than $500,000 a year, and then there’s the cost of travel. “Even if you have a sponsorship deal with SDX or someone, it’s going to cost you $800,000 if you want to compete on the ACC or national level.” That’s about $700,000 more than lacrosse generated last year.

Winning helps. Two of the most successful women’s basketball programs, Tennessee and Connecticut, made money in 2003-04, according to financial statements filed with the U.S. Department of Education.

State’s Cobb says baseball and women’s basketball eventually could sustain themselves. The school spent $6 million last year to renovate its baseball field, which should boost attendance. But it’s far from a sure thing. “We’ve got a game tomorrow, and the temperature is supposed to be 39 degrees. Winning obviously helps, but so does nice weather.”

GlaxoSmithKline might have thought it was immune. The drug maker recently played bystander as several Research Triangle Park neighbors took a licking. First, tests indicated Inspire Pharmaceuticals’ new ocular lubricant was no more a sight for sore eyes than a placebo. Then Biogen Idec, which made an acclaimed multiple sclerosis drug, revealed that three users had died of liver damage. In Durham, Icagen quit testing an experimental epilepsy drug because of safety concerns.

But only a few days after Biogen stopped sales of Tysabri, the federal Food and Drug Administration halted GSK’s testing of its code-named 699 multiple sclerosis drug because it worked on a similar principle. “It was chemically different, but the FDA hit the pause button to figure out what happened to Tysabri,” GSK spokeswoman Gaile Renegar says.

Traditionally, for every 10,000 chemical compounds tested, only one is approved for sale. The odds may be getting even longer. Experts blame heightened awareness of drug safety, a proliferation of new compounds and other factors for a rash of canceled or delayed drug launches.

Tar Heel drug makers could use a dose of the antidepressant Zoloft. The Triangle feels the pain more than most drug centers. It has giants like 6,000-employee GSK, which has one of its North American headquarters in RTP, as well as smaller companies such as Inspire, which typically work on early-stage drugs when risks of failure are highest. Chapel Hill-based Pozen recently had a migraine drug approved — but only after two others failed in 2003 and 2004. Cases such as those and Inspire’s diquafosol, which the company had hoped the FDA would accept as a dry-eye treatment, show the hurdles new drugs face.

Inspire applied for permission to test diquafosol in June 2003, says Jenny Kobin, senior director of investor relations. Tests proceeded, and the company hoped to market it this year. But in early 2004, the FDA ordered more tests. The verdict was that diquafosol was no more effective than a saline solution. Inspire stock dropped 45% the day of the FDA announcement.

But not all dead-end drugs are dead. Kobin says Inspire hopes to get FDA approval to sell its dry-eye drug for corneal wounds, such as those left by laser surgery. Sometimes Plan B works out OK, too: Scientists at New York-based Pfizer Pharmaceuticals were testing a drug called sildenafil in the early 1990s for use in treating the heart condition angina when they discovered unexpected side effects. Viagra sales topped $1.5 billion in 2004.

Imagine that your bank had paid more than $1.1 billion to make two legal cases go away in the past couple of months. And fessed up to losing credit-card data for up to 1.2 million customers. You might think twice about doing business with it. Charlotte-based Bank of America Corp. did all those things, but it didn’t seem to matter. “It’s funny how it just doesn’t seem to stick,” says Tony Plath, associate professor of finance at UNC Charlotte.

In February, BofA agreed to pay $675 million — without admitting guilt — to end a federal Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of its mutual-fund trading. The SEC had accused the bank and its year-old acquisition, FleetBoston Financial, of market timing, trading shares to take advantage of price differences in different markets, and of late trading, buying and selling shares after markets close.

In March, the bank announced it would pay $460.5 million to settle lawsuits by investors who had bought bonds of WorldCom before the Clinton, Miss.-based telecom giant filed for bankruptcy amid fraud accusations in 2002. The suits contended that BofA brokers sold them bonds when they should have known the company was on the ropes. Also in March, BofA admitted that it had lost computer tapes containing personal information on as many as 1.2 million federal workers.

True, BofA’s stock price slipped 5% in March, but at least some of that could have been caused by other concerns such as rising interest rates. One ingredient in BofA’s Teflon coating is timing. Its problems have come after a series of bigger scandals. “They did the wrong thing at the right time,” Plath says.

While most of the accusations are about technical matters beyond the ken of average bank customers, the company can counter with one easy-to-digest statistic: Net income jumped 30% to $14 billion in 2004. BofA also has been able to manage its bad news. It often employs a standard PR tactic of settling lawsuits — even though some might see it as an admission of guilt. “A lot of what I see them doing, it doesn’t necessarily surprise me,” says Adam Bernstein, a principal at Charlotte-based Carolina Public Relations. “But I’m always impressed with how they’re able to manage it.”

She fell outside her doctor’s office after her checkup, losing her balance when she stepped off the pavement onto the grass. There’s nothing unusual about an 84-year-old woman falling. And if it had to happen, it’s hard to imagine a better place — other than an emergency room — for it to occur.

Her head bashed the concrete. But that didn’t hurt as much as her left arm, with which she had tried to break the fall. A man driving by stopped and helped her to her feet. She went back inside: Her bones were getting so brittle, her doctor had once told her, any fall could snap one. He felt her forearm. Nothing, he assured her, was broken. He didn’t bother to X-ray it. Nobody even looked at the knot swelling on the back of her head. The waiting room was full. It was a busy day. She got in her car and drove home.

When the daughter who lives with her came home from work four hours later, she found her mother waiting — in pain, forearm swelling, nauseated. The daughter, a medical technician, knew that people get sick to their stomachs when a fracture leaks marrow into the bloodstream. She took her mother to an urgent-care center, which X-rayed the arm. It was broken in two places. The limb was so swollen they had to cut the wedding ring off her finger.

When the daughter — my sister-in-law — called to tell the doctor, he wanted to see the X-rays. Dreams of trial lawyers no doubt deviled his sleep that night. But when my mother-in-law talked to my wife the following day, the first thing she said was she wasn’t going to sue him. But she knew she had to find another doctor: She couldn’t go back to this one.

She asked me not to write anything about it. But rarely a month goes by that this magazine doesn’t carry something — whether it’s a major piece such as last July’s cover story or an item as brief as a Tattler — about the mess we’ve made of our health-care system. We believe this is one of the most important issues facing not only business but our whole society. Though many in the medical community are doing their damndest to demonize plaintiffs’ attorneys and lay the blame on lawyers’ venality and greed, an incident such as this one can’t help but remind us: The boogeyman isn’t always the one carrying the briefcase.

Sharon Decker is a preacher’s daughter, former beauty queen, mother, executive and now an innkeeper and business owner. When people ask her if women can have it all, she says sure. “Just not at the same time.” She left a job in August as president of Tanner Holdings, the planning arm of Tanner Cos., a Rutherfordton clothing manufacturer. Her reason, she says, was to follow her heart to a new business.

Decker, 48, a former Duke Power executive who chaired the Charlotte Chamber in 1998, spent nearly $1 million to buy and renovate the town hall and firehouse, built in 1925, and two other buildings in downtown Rutherfordton, about 70 miles west of Charlotte. She used them to start The Tapestry Group LLC, which offers retreats, seminars, consulting and other services for women struggling with competing pressures. She, her husband, Bob, and four children have lived in Rutherfordton since 1999, when she became president of Tanner’s Doncaster division. The centerpiece of Tapestry is The Firehouse Inn, where the four beds are made with Italian linens and some rooms have gas fireplaces.

Decker says Tapestry is more akin to a religious calling. “There’s a work life. There’s a personal life. There may not be a spiritual life. I look at life as a tapestry. It has threads. Some are broken. Sometimes colors work or don’t work. But in the end, it’s a beautiful piece of work.”

One of three daughters of a Baptist minister, she was Miss Gastonia and graduated with a bachelor’s in economics in 1979 from UNC Greensboro. She worked for Duke Power from 1980 to 1997, starting as a customer-service representative and becoming the company’s first woman vice president. In 1997, she started the Lynnwood Foundation, which oversaw preservation of the Duke mansion, Charlotte home of Duke Power founder James B. Duke. She was president and CEO until 1999.

But she hasn’t left the corporate life altogether. She is on the boards of Charlotte-based Coca-Cola Bottling Company Consolidated, Matthews-based Family Dollar Stores and Herschend Family Entertainment Group, a Branson, Mo.-based theme-park operator. She also is a student in a two-year program for lay pastors at the Presbytery of Western North Carolina’s School for the Laity.

The Tapestry Group has five employees, including her and her husband. The Deckers also have formed North Washington Street Properties, a real-estate company, and she remains a consultant to Tanner Holdings. She also is paid to speak at businesses and community forums and is writing a religious-themed book.

Still, she says she won’t be trying to juggle too many roles at once. “Now I think of it as synchronization — not balance.”

Les Merritt seems to have the right pedigree for state auditor. He’s the first certified public accountant to fill the post. He has been a Wake County commissioner, which gives him grassroots political experience, and he has performed public audits as a partner in Zebulon-based Merritt, Petway, Mills & Hockaday. After losing in 2000, he beat Ralph Campbell in a close election last November.

But is he tough enough? Campbell frequently riled bureaucrats, including fellow Democrats, with his high-profile audits, but voters knew he was on the job and returned him to office twice. Merritt, 53, plans to keep a lower profile. Since November, he has met with heads of state agencies and says he hopes to change the duck-and-cover mentality that they told him guided their relationships with his predecessor.

An auditor, he says, earns his salt by correcting small problems before they become big embarrassments. “We’re not out there aiming at having a sensational report or surprising anybody with things that could have been headed off earlier, so I really want to change how the office operates.” Doing that could require more manpower. But first, Merritt plans to see if he can accomplish his goals merely by doing things more efficiently. He also wants to take a closer look at how nonprofits spend state money.

He grew up on a tobacco farm in Sampson County and earned two bachelor’s degrees from N.C. State University. He got one in economics in 1974 and another in accounting four years later after management training at Central Carolina Bank, now part of Atlanta-based SunTrust Banks. “I found out that I could really like that accounting stuff, I guess, especially when I was going through the audit department.”

After passing his CPA exam, he moved to Zebulon in 1981 to work for Robert Privette’s practice and made partner in 1983. He went solo in ’88. When he sold his stake last year to eliminate possible conflicts of interest, his firm employed 11 CPAs. About 40% of revenue came from public agencies. All along, he had followed what the auditor’s office was doing and finally decided he could do it better.

Having a Republican auditor might spook Democrats, but Merritt says they have no more to fear than members of his party do. And he says he’s not afraid to make people mad. “I can talk about bridge building all I want to, but I’m sure there’s going to come a time that you’re on somebody’s foot, whether it’s a Republican or a Democrat, and you got to go where that carries you. It’s just the nature of the office.”

Maybe they should have seen it coming. After all, executives of Kannapolis-based Pro-Tint Inc. and Charlotte-based United Packaging & Industrial Inc. were trying to adapt a product to help military helicopter pilots see through their windshields better. But the two companies flew blindly on a collision course created by their informal partnership.

At stake: millions of dollars in defense and commercial contracts for a product that could have applications on any aircraft. Neither side is talking — to each other or to journalists. But Pro-Tint wants a Superior Court judge to bar United Packaging and a subsidiary, United Protective Technologies, from filling orders until the courts determine whether Pro-Tint is entitled to a share of the proceeds.

The story starts in 1997, when Steve Fricker — vice president and part-owner of Pro-Tint, which also installs tinted windows in buildings and automobiles — started selling sheets of transparent polyester windshield covers to stock-car racing teams. NASCAR had ordered them to replace glass windshields with shatterproof plastic. But grit and other debris quickly nicked the plastic. Fricker’s coverings protected it. When the top sheet became nicked or soiled, it could be torn off — free sheets to the wind — leaving a clear surface. Most top NASCAR teams use the coverings.

In 2001, defense agencies asked Pro-Tint about using the sheets. The following year, United Packaging representatives, who said they had experience with military contracts, suggested a collaboration to refine the sheets and to market and sell them, according to Pro-Tint’s request for a preliminary injunction.

Pro-Tint and United Packaging orally agreed at the time that “each would contribute its respective expertise” to create a third company, United Protective Technologies, to manage the project. But when the company was incorporated in July, Pro-Tint wasn’t listed as an owner. Still, it continued working with United. It did likewise in 2003 after rejecting a written agreement that would have given it half the profits but, it says, ceded control to United. The military approved the sheets in late 2004, Pro-Tint says.

In mid-January, United’s lawyers sent Pro-Tint a letter telling it to stop claiming that it was part of the project. Pro-Tint says United planned to begin filling orders a month later.

In its motion, Pro-Tint seeks a share of the project’s profits, damages and acknowledgement of its role in the product. As of early March, no hearing had been set. And it didn’t look as if either side could see its way to a compromise.

I had considered writing about the time I saved Hunter S. Thompson from getting busted when the father of gonzo journal-ism whipped out a joint in a bar frequented by off-duty Miami vice cops. But the prospect of doing two columns in a row on dead men so depresses me that, rather than ponder the mysteries of life or lack thereof, I’ll try to tackle a thornier question: What is it that women really want?

Before I’m accused of being too in touch with my inner pig, let me point out that this is the crux of this month’s cover story, probably one of the most difficult pieces we’ve ever put together. The problem with making the paucity of women CEOs a Business North Carolina story is that there’s nothing peculiar to North Carolina about it.

Yes, only one of the 14 Fortune 500 companies based in the state has a woman CEO. But there are only eight on the national list, and one of them — Hewlett-Packard’s Carly Fiorina — has been booted since it was published last fall. For you stat fans, that means 7% of North Carolina’s Fortune 500 CEOs are — is — female, compared with 1.6% nationwide. (And that’s with Carly counted; without her, it’s 1.4%.)

A woman running a major corporation is a rarity, not only in this socially conservative state but across the country. And what has held them back has not been all that testosterone at the top. “None of the women I talked to complained about ever being discriminated against because of gender,” says Senior Editor Ed Martin, who wrote the story. “Maybe that’s because the kind of women who succeed don’t face this kind of discrimination or can work around and overcome it.”

Discrimination, in all its guises, exists, of course, but an even bigger factor is at play, one that wasn’t around 30 years ago when my wife and her friends were boarding buses to Raleigh to lobby for the Equal Rights Amendment — which North Carolina still hasn’t passed. Women now have more choices. They’re not always easy to make.

Not everybody — male or female — can or should be the boss. Not everybody wants to. But because only women can bear children, and still bear the brunt of bringing them up, they’re at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to investing the single- minded drive it takes to reach the top. And unlike some of the women in senior management Ed interviewed for his story, most don’t make the millions that afford them nannies and other resources to balance home and job. For many career women, these choices are indeed sacrifices.

Still, these women managers are lucky. For many, maybe most, working-class women, it’s not and never has been a matter of choice. Thirty years ago, this state had the highest female participation in the work force of any industrial state, a legacy of the textile industry and the low wages it paid men and women. “Moreover, women were expected to run their households and nurture their children even after putting in long hours at the mill,” Al Stuart writes in The North Carolina Atlas. “Thus, having a ‘career’ and a family is nothing new to the women of North Carolina.”

The economy of the Triad — famous for making textiles, apparel, furniture and cigarettes — is changing. As production moves overseas, the 12-county region’s manufacturing sector dwindles — jobs decreased 10.4% from mid- 2002 to mid-2004 — and its focus shifts from traditional industries to new ones created by research and development. Senior Editor Arthur O. Murray discussed this trend with Sue Cole, regional CEO of U.S. Trust in Greensboro and past chairman of North Carolina Citizens for Business and Industry, the state chamber of commerce; Richard Dean, president of Wake Forest University Health Services in Winston-Salem; Charlie Greene, president of furniture maker Classic Gallery Group in High Point; James Renick, chancellor of North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro; and Penny Whiteheart, senior vice president of the Piedmont Triad Partnership economic-development agency.