He is an internationally acclaimed author and speaker on the topics of leadership, continual improvement, and recognition, Pat Townsend re-entered the corporate world as the Chief Quality Officer for UICI, a unique and diverse financial services company, in February 2000.

Townsend's mission:  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.  UICI is headquartered in the Fort Worth, Texas area.

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.  The CQP at UICI began within eight months of Townsend's arrival and immediately began showing impressive bottom-line results. 

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.

His first book, Commit to Quality, 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. 

His second book, Quality in Action:  93 Lessons in Leadership, Participation, and Measurement 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, a book which uses military leadership lessons as a primary benchmark.

Recognition, Gratitude & Celebration, 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 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 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 350 articles that Townsend and his co-author/wife, Joan Gebhardt, have had published.  In the last three years, they have had pieces printed in magazines in America, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Africa, England, and India. 

Quality Makes Money, was published by ASQ Press in July, 2005.  It presents both the supporting theory for a Complete Quality Process as well as a step-by-step blueprint for defining, implementing, and maintaining such an effort. 

Prior to 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.