More than 30 years ago, Dick Grote was the manager of training and development for Frito-Lay, one of America’s most sophisticated and best managed companies. Out of the blue, they found themselves ensnared in a PR nightmare. Day after day, mailbags arrived at Frito-Lay’s corporate headquarters filled with angry letters from angry customers, each letter reporting the same bizarre problem: The customer had discovered an obscene message written on a potato chip. All of the chips in question had been produced at the same plant – a plant that in the previous 9 months had fired 58 of its 210 employees for various breaches of discipline. The climate at that particular plant was toxic while supervisors were using a traditional “progressive discipline” system for all violations, serious or trivial. Dick soon realized the issue was not with the disciplinary problems in the plant but the disciplinary system itself…and then DWP was born.A year after implementing this new process, terminations at that plant had dropped from 58 to 19; the following year, they were down to 2.