About Dick Grote
Corporate
Dick Grote began his work life as an Industrial Engineer. He spent the first five years of his career with General Electric, graduating from GE’s acclaimed Manufacturing Training Program. At GE he spent one of his years as a second shift foreman and had assignments in union relations, hourly employment, and as a layoff coordinator.
He was recruited away from GE by United Airlines to be the personnel manager for all of United Airlines’ East Coast operations. This assignment also included shutting down United’s maintenance base in Washington, D.C. and laying off more than 2200 airframe and powerplant mechanics. Dick then moved to United’s corporate headquarters in Chicago where he spent three years in the company’s management development department.
In 1972 he was again recruited away, this time by PepsiCo. He joined Frito-Lay, PepsiCo’s most profitable division, in Dallas, Texas as corporate director of training and development. At Frito-Lay he developed the remarkable Discipline Without Punishment® performance management system. In 1977, after five years with Frito-Lay, he left the corporate world to become a full-time management consultant.
Consulting
Dick Grote has been a management consultant for almost thirty years, specializing exclusively in the field of performance management. As a consultant, he has created performance management systems for several hundred of the world’s best known and most respected companies, including Texas Instruments, JCPenney, Miller Brewing Company, American Airlines, Macy’s, Raytheon, Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, and Herman Miller.
While most of his clients are Fortune 500 companies, he has also worked with international charitable organizations like CARE and the American Red Cross. He was engaged by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey following the destruction of the World Trade Center, buildings that the Port Authority owned, on September 11. He was engaged by LucasFilm to help George Lucas integrate his five companies (including Skywalker Sound and Industrial Light and Magic) into “one company, one culture.” He was awarded a medal by the director of the National Security Agency for his work in creating a new performance management system for NSA. He is the rare management consultant who has been engaged by a labor union — he was hired by the Screen Actors Guild to facilitate their planned merger with AFTRA, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.
Writing
Dick is the author of the books, Discipline Without Punishment and The Complete Guide to Performance Appraisal. Both books were major book club selections and have been translated into Chinese and Arabic. Discipline Without Punishment has become a management classic and has just been issued in an updated second edition.
Paramount Pictures bought the movie rights to Discipline Without Punishment and produced the video series Respect and Responsibility with Dick as on-camera host. His highly popular book on performance appraisal, The Performance Appraisal Question and Answer Book, was published by the American Management Association in 2002.
His most recent book, Forced Ranking: Making Performance Management Work, was published by the Harvard Business School Press in November 2005.
For five years, Dick Grote was a regular commentator on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” program. For twenty years he was adjunct professor of management at the University of Dallas graduate school. His articles have appeared in the Harvard Business Review and The Wall Street Journal.
