Dick Grote

Richard Charles Grote died at age 82 on July 6, 2024, from Acute Myeloid Leukemia. Dick enjoyed the death that almost everyone wants and virtually no one gets—without pain, no medical equipment around, surrounded by loving family.

Dick, son of a corporate lawyer, was born in New York City in the hospital where his grandfather was chief of surgery. He grew up in Plainfield NJ, a New York City suburb, and graduated from Colgate University, Hamilton, NY. At Colgate he was a member of Colgate’s GE College Bowl team. Colgate was the first college in the history of the highly popular nation-wide CBS TV quiz show to win five times in a row and be “Retired Undefeated Champions.”

After Colgate, Dick joined General Electric’s renowned Management Training Program. At GE, he worked in various employee relations jobs in Rome, GA, Oklahoma City OK, and Lynn MA.

He was then recruited by United Air Lines, at that time the country‘s largest airline. After five years at United, Dick was asked to join Frito-Lay to be corporate Manager of Training and Development for the company.

He arrived in Dallas to take his new job in March 1972. Within an hour after getting off the plane, Dick realized, “I have found my home.” That conviction of having found home stayed with him for the rest of his life – he never expressed any desire to leave Dallas.

At Frito-Lay he developed the “Positive Discipline” approach to solving people problems and building personal responsibility. With the success of Positive Discipline at Frito-Lay, Dick left Frito-Lay to become a management consultant in 1977.

Over the next 42 years, Dick became one of the world’s most renowned management consultants, specializing in helping large, multi-national corporations manage human performance.

He was engaged by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey following the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11. He was engaged by LucasFilm to help George Lucas integrate his five companies into “one company, one culture” as part of its sale to Disney. 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 was the rare management consultant to be engaged by a labor union. He developed a unique specialty of consulting with large corporations and government agencies in Southeast Asia.

Dick wrote seven books on managing human performance. Paramount Pictures bought the movie rights to his book, Discipline Without Punishment, and produced a video series about managing people with Dick as on-screen host. The Harvard Business School made a series of videos about Dick’s approach to leadership for use in their Executive Education programs.

Dick was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the Institute of Museum Services Board, charged with determining which American museums were to receive federal funding. In Dallas, he served on the boards of The Dallas Opera, The Dallas Theatre Center, the Dallas Chamber Music Society, and the Shakespeare Festival. He was cast as a supernumerary in The Dallas Opera’s production of Rossini’s opera, The Italian Girl in Algiers. He played the triangle with the SMU Conservatory Orchestra’s performance on the stage of the Meyerson Symphony Center.

He was a regular contributor to the Harvard Business Review and other journals. For five years he 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.

Early in life Dick realized that one of his lifetime goals was to travel all over the world. He took over 40 international trips to Europe, South America, the Middle East, Australia, and Southeast Asia. Sometimes he would be hiking mountains and exploring remote villages; sometimes making management presentations to companies in locations as distant as northern Canada to the island of Borneo; sometimes simply enjoying the culture and wonder of faraway places.

Dick loved making people laugh. He had a gift for it. He was almost always happy, delightfully happy, and it showed.

His intellectual curiosity was always on display. He adored books and built a library of rare literary classics. He enjoyed theater and spent one year as a theater critic, attending and reviewing 107 plays produced by member companies of the Dallas Theatre League. He loved hats and hated baseball beanies. He sought out rare plants for his garden.

Dick’s success as a management consultant and civic benefactor was dwarfed by the happiness of his marriage to Jacqueline Center in 1991. Dick loved Jacqueline. She was his happy companion and true friend . . . his buddy, his pal, his lover, his chum, his work partner, his life partner, and his truly beloved wife. He adored her.

With Jacqueline, together with his cherished sister-in-law Joanne and his brother-in-law Jerry, his many treasured friends, Jacqueline’s extended Texas family, and – during the final journey of his life – the caring team at Faith Presbyterian Hospice, Dick’s life was enriched beyond measure.

A life well spent. He will be missed.

In lieu of flowers, Dick requested that those wishing to honor his memory make a donation to UT Southwestern Medical Center, Faith Presbyterian Hospice, or The Nature Conservancy.