In this third installment of our five-part series, we talk with Jim Templin, CEO of ASQE.

Yes, you read that right, ASQE. As in ASQ Excellence. It’s an entirely new legal entity connected at the hip to the ASQ we all know and love. It’s a trade organization that other organizations can belong to, not individuals (which is what ASQ is all about). Current membership is about 180 organizations, including Procter & Gamble, FedEx, and the IRS. Dozens have joined in 2022 alone.

Some weeks ago, Quality Digest Editor in Chief Dirk Dusharme and I attended ASQ’s 2022 World Conference on Quality and Improvement (WCQI) in Anaheim, California. It was the first in-person conference since Covid hit the world, and attendance was just over 1,000, about a third of what had been the norm.

ASQ made its leadership available for wide-ranging video interviews covering everything from the future of the quality profession to the organization’s new legal structure. Quality Digest appreciates ASQ’s efforts to help us provide valuable reporting to our readers.

In all, we conducted five interviews with:
• ASQ’s CEO Ann Jordan
• ASQ’s board of directors
• ASQE’s (ASQ Excellence) CEO Jim Templin
• ASQE’s board of directors
• Both CEOs together to discuss their “connected journey”

Jim Templin joined ASQ in 2016 as director of membership, then held various executive director positions, including Membership and Communities, B2C Operations, Individual Membership Solutions, and interim CEO of ASQ. He was appointed CEO of the newly formed ASQE in 2020.

In this interview, we started off with a detailed description of what exactly is the ASQE, and then dove into how it interfaces with ASQ and affects its members, and why ASQE had to be created in the first place.

We asked Templin to summarize the current state of affairs by answering our final question: In five words or fewer, what is the quality profession’s future?

The clip below is the first three minutes of the interview. Listen to the full interview here.