About Grote Consulting

Learn more about our Founder, Dick Grote

dick-groteAbout Dick Grote

Dick Grote 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. 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 joined Frito-Lay in Dallas, Texas as corporate director of training and development. At Frito-Lay, Dick developed the unique Discipline Without Punishment® performance management system.

Consulting

In 1977 Dick left the corporate world to start his own consulting practice specializing exclusively in the field of performance management. Since then he has created performance management systems for several hundred of the world’s best known and most-respected organizations, including Texas Instruments, JCPenney, Caterpillar, American Airlines, the City of Houston, United States Congressional Budget Office, Raytheon, Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, and the State of Georgia. While most of his clients are Fortune 500 companies, he has also worked with international charitable organizations like CARE, the American Red Cross and Catholic Relief Services. 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.

International

Dick Grote has worked with organizations throughout the world. His international clients include Swarovski, the Government of Malaysia, Holcim, Qatar Petroleum, A.P. Møller – Mærsk A/S, Novo Nordisk, and Brunei Investment Agency. His two-day seminar in Singapore on Strategy-Based Performance Management was attended by about 60 delegates from Japan, Korea, Brunei, Oman, the People’s Republic of China, and most of the ASEAN . Because of his extensive experience in working with clients all over the world, Dick. Grote understands that what may work perfectly in a U.S. setting might not work the same way in other countries. He therefore customizes his presentations to suit the culture and the level of sophistication of each international audience.

Discovering a Cultural Bias

In this video, which was produced by the Harvard Business School, Dick Grote talks about the risks of having our Western culture and assumptions influence how we look at performance in non-Western organizations.

Writing

Dick is the author of the books, Discipline Without Punishment, The Complete Guide to Performance Appraisal, The Performance Appraisal Question and Answer Book, and Forced Ranking: Making Performance Management Work, which was published by the Harvard Business School Press in November 2005. Dick’s most recent book, How to Be Good at Performance Appraisals, was published by the Harvard Business School Press in June 2011. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages including Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Arabic and Thai. Paramount Pictures bought the movie rights to Discipline Without Punishment and produced the award-winning video series Respect and Responsibility with Dick as on-camera host.

In 2013 the Harvard Business School made a series of videos of Dick Grote providing his observations and counsel on performance management for Harvard’s executive education programs. In 2016 the Harvard Business Review produced and published a series of Dick Grote’s “Tools” to help managers on the subjects of goal-setting and performance reviews.

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.