Biography of Pat Townsend

Townsend's mission: to be the catalyst for a quality process that actively involves every one of UICI's 2000+ employees in the continual improvement of every aspect of the corporation. UICI is headquartered in Dallas, Texas.

He has succeeded in leading the implementation of a Complete Quality Process (CQP), his unique - and uniquely successful - approach insuring 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. The CQP at UICI began within eight months of Townsend's arrival and immediately began showing impressive bottom-line results.

Townsend 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.

His first book, Commit to Quality (John Wiley & Sons, 1986), described the highly successful Quality Has Value effort at the Paul Revere Insurance Group, a process that Tom Peters once called the "best quality process in any service organization in North America." Townsend was the Director of that effort, a precedent-setting 100% employee-involvement process. Commit to Quality has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Norwegian.

Townsend was a member of the original team that defined the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 1987 and served as an Examiner for that Award for two years.

His second book, Quality in Action: 93 Lessons in Leadership, Participation, and Measurement (John Wiley & Sons, 1992) presented 31 lessons in each of the three main components of a quality process. It has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese, and Korean.

Townsend continued his exploration of the role of leadership in any successful organization with Five-Star Leadership: The Art and Strategy of Creating Leaders at Every Level (John Wiley & Sons, 1997), a book which uses military leadership lessons as a primary benchmark. It has been translated into Chinese.

Recognition, Gratitude & Celebration (Crisp Publications, 1997), Townsend's fourth book, concentrated on an act of leadership which is a vital part of any quality process: the act of saying "Thank you." While offering a number of examples of "how" to say thank you, the book focuses on "why" saying thank you is both appropriate and good business.

In 1999, How Organizations Learn: Investigate, Identify, Institutionalize (Crisp Publications) drew from several resources, including the United States Army's After-Action Review, to offer a proven methodology for capturing knowledge and putting it to use.

Quality Is Everybody's Business (1999) was first published by East West Books of Chennai, India and then by CRC Press of the United States. It consists of 49 of the more than 200 articles that Townsend and his co-author/wife, Joan Gebhardt, have had published.

Prior to joining the Paul Revere Insurance Group 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.

He has a B.S. (Mathematics) from Marquette University and an M.S. (Computer Science) from the United States Naval Postgraduate School

Programs:

Commit to Quality

Quality is Everything

Quality Is Everybody's Business

The Art and Strategy of Creating Leaders at Every Level