A conversation with A. Blanton Godfrey

Called the “Forest Gump of Quality” by the editor of this journal, A. Blanton Godfrey has somehow been involved in most of the important events in our quality engineering world over the past fifty years. He was head of the Quality Theory and Technology Department at Bell Labs, the department Walter Shewhart created in 2025. He was on the committee that created ISO 9000. With Gerry Hahn he created the committee for ASA that became the Quality and Productivity Section. With Jeff Hooper he created what is now the Quality and Productivity Research Conference. He was one of the founding judges of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. With Don Berwick he created the National Demonstration Project for Quality Improvement in Healthcare that became the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. As an adjunct professor he taught graduate courses in the Engineering School at Columbia University for nineteen years. He co-taught courses in clinical quality for four summers at Harvard. He was Chair and CEO of Juran Institute for thirteen years. He was the founding editor of what is now the Lean Six Sigma Review. He was the Dean of the Wilson College of Textiles at North Carolina State University for fourteen years and a professor in the college for 24 years. He has spent the last twelve years working closely with colleagues at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Global Public Health and UNICEF on data visualizations for maternal and child health.