Richard Barrett (author)


Richard Barrett, is a British author who writes about leadership, leadership development, values, consciousness as well as cultural evolution in business and society. He is responsible for developing the theory of the Universal Stages of Evolution, the concepts of personal and cultural entropy, and creating assessment instruments to map the values of individuals, organisations, communities and, nations to the Seven Levels of Consciousness Model. He founded the Barrett Values Centre in 1997.

Early life and education

Richard Barrett was born on 7 March 1945, in Kingston upon Hull, United Kingdom. In 1966, he graduated from Manchester University with a First Class Honors degree in Civil Engineering. He received a postgraduate engineering degree in highway and transportation engineering from Newcastle University.

Career

After spending time working for the Municipality of Leicester and Freeman Fox & Partners, he set up his own consultancy practice in 1977. He acted as a consultant to the World Bank from 1979 to 1985, officially joining the World Bank as a staff member in 1986. In 1992, he became the Assistant to the Vice-President for Environmentally Sustainable Development and started the World Bank Spiritual Unfoldment Society. From 1995 to 1997, he conducted an inquiry into values at the World Bank.
Throughout this period Barrett spent most of his spare time studying psychology, spirituality, physics, and personal transformation.
He left the World Bank in 1997, and created the management consulting firm of Richard Barrett & Associates. The purpose of this organisation was to "provide consultants, change agents and human resource professionals with tools and techniques for assessing their values and implementing organizational transformation."
In 1998, he published Liberating the Corporate Soul: Building a Visionary Organisation, in which he described the Seven Levels of Consciousness model and the values mapping instruments known as the Cultural Transformation Tools. He also introduced the concept of the Seven Levels of Leadership Consciousness.
From 1986 to 1999, Barrett lived in Alexandria, Virginia. In 1999, he moved to Western North Carolina in the vicinity of Asheville.
From 2005 to 2007, he spearheaded an inquiry into Whole System Change in organisations. The results of this inquiry are presented in Building a Values-driven Organisation: A Whole System Approach to Cultural Transformation, published in 2006. In this book he showed how the Cultural Transformation Tools had been used to transform the cultures of organisations. He also introduced the concepts of cultural entropy, and personal entropy and showed how they could be measured.
Barrett said, "...more and more companies making some form of contribution to society. They have discovered that making money and making a difference are mutually supportive goals. When companies care about their employees, the local community and society, their employees, the local community and society care about them. The dynamic that I was measuring was simply the wisdom of the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you, or, as I prefer to describe it, the energy you put out into the world is the energy you get back. This is particularly true with regard to employees."
From 2002 to 2009, he developed the concept of Three Universal Stages of Evolution based on a more inclusive definition of the concept of consciousness. This theory is presented in The New Leadership Paradigm, published in 2011. This book is part of the integrated learning system with a Web site and downloadable learning modules for leading self, leading a team, leading an organisation and leading in society. Other concepts introduced in this book include the Seven Levels of Motivation, The Seven Levels of Identity, the Seven Levels of Happiness, and the Six Modes of Decision-Making.
During the period 2001 to 2007, Barrett experimented using the Cultural Transformation Tools to map the values of nations. Between 2007 and 2010, these tools were used to map the personal values, current culture values, and the desired cultural values of a statistically valid sample 12 nations and several communities. In many of these nations, the results of the values assessments have been used to begin nationwide dialogues on values. In Latvia and Iceland, the results of the values assessments have been instrumental in reorienting public policies.
From June 2009 to September 2010, Barrett moved to Hull to care for his mother who died at age 100 in August 2010. Barrett now lives in Bath, Somerset.

Books