Patrick Townsend

Mr. Pat Townsend is an internationally acclaimed author and speaker on the topics of leadership, continual improvement, and recognition. From 2000 until 2004 he served as the Chief Quality Officer for UICI, a unique and diverse financial services company headquartered in the Fort Worth, Texas. His mission at UICI was to be the catalyst for a quality process that actively involved every one of the UICI Insurance Center's 1200+ employees in the continual improvement of every aspect of the corporation. He succeeded in leading the implementation of a Complete Quality process (CQP), his unique – and uniquely successful – approach which insures that an organization's quality effort reaches every aspect of the company and benefits from the knowledge, ability, and enthusiasm of every person on the payroll.

Prior to that he spent the previous dozen years giving keynote presentations and conducting workshops throughout the United States and in Turkey, Brazil, India, Belarus, Sweden, Canada, Finland, and Singapore. He was a member of the committee that defined and established the Malcolm Baldrige United States National Quality Award and was an Examiner for that award for two years.

Before joining the business world in 1983, Townsend served for twenty years in the United States Marine Corps. He had a wide assortment of duties, ranging from being the commanding officer of an artillery unit in combat to teaching college history and from being a public affairs officer for a recruiting command to being the commanding officer of a refugee camp. Since 1986, he has authored or coauthored seven books on quality – the latest entitled Quality Makes Money , was published in July 2005, by the American Society for Quality Press. He has a B.S. (Mathematics) from Marquette University and an M.S. (Computer Science) from the United States Naval Postgraduate School.