Richard Barrett

Biographical Information
"Richard Barrett is an internationally known author, speaker and consultant on leadership, values and culture in business and society.

"He is a visiting lecturer at the Consulting and Coaching for Change, leadership course run jointly by HEC Executive Education in Paris and the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. He is also an adjunct professor at Royal Roads University, Institute for Values-based Leadership in Canada.

"Richard is a Fellow of the World Business Academy, and former Values Coordinator at the World Bank. He is the creator of the Cultural Transformation Tools® and The New Leadership Paradigm."

He is responsible for developing the theory of the Universal Stages of Evolution, the concepts of personal and cultural entropy, and creating assessment instruments (based on Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs and models of higher consciousness) to map the values of individuals, organisations, communities and, nations to the Seven Levels of Consciousness Model.

Background
"He began his career in 1967, working as a transportation planner for the municipality of Leicester, England. In 1969, he joined Freeman Fox and Associates, a highly regarded engineering-consulting firm in Great Britain. ...He became one of the world's leading experts on urban transportation. And once again, he grew restless. For years, Barrett had been studying spirituality, science, and psychology, and what he really wanted was to write a book on the interconnections between those three disciplines. In 1989, he began writing A Guide to Liberating Your Soul (Fulfilling Books, 1995). It was five years in the making.

"In the meantime, his work for the World Bank continued - and continued to go well. In 1992, he was promoted and given a new title: assistant to Ismail Serageldin, the vice president for environmentally sustainable development. At about the same time, he set up a series of meetings on spirituality at the World Bank... Barrett began the World Bank Spiritual Unfoldment Society. Within a couple of months, the Washington Post wrote a favorable article about the fledgling group... Mark Malloch-Brown, the vice president for external relations, sent back an email to Barrett. "You'd better come see me," it read... What Barrett learned was that the bank needed a new image - and that spirituality might provide the key to creating one. "I agree with you," Malloch-Brown said. "But how do we get this on the agenda?" Barrett was overjoyed. "I know how to do it," he replied. "Let me write out a plan for you."

"He wrote a statement outlining what would need to be done to put spirituality on the organization's core agenda. Two months later, when he returned from a trip to Vietnam, his proposal to create a "values circle" - which would meet to talk about that agenda - had become a reality. "I volunteered to show up," Barrett says. "When the meeting started, someone said, 'We need somebody to work on this full-time.' I volunteered again."

"He was given yet another new title: values coordinator. By April 1996, his work was finally bearing fruit. The values circle had begun a process to align the World Bank's activities with a core set of values. Barrett was given a mandate to do four specific things: increase membership in the circle; develop a values tool kit; train 50 people to use the tools in the kit and to promote the circle's mission; a and build Web site that would deal with values and that would link to the World Bank's own site."

His partner is Joan Shafer.

Books
Richard Barrett is the author of A Guide to Liberating Your Soul(1995), Liberating the Corporate Soul: Building a Visionary Organization (1998), Building a Values-Driven Organization: A Whole System Approach to Cultural Transformation (2006), The New Leadership Paradigm (2011), Love, Fear and the Destiny of Nations: The Impact of the Evolution of Human Consciousness on World Affairs (2013), What My Soul Told Me: A Guide to Soul Activation(2013), and The Values-Driven Organisation: Unleashing Human Potential for Performance and Profit (July 2103). He is a contributing author to Psychometrics in Coaching (2012).

Affiliations

 * Founder and chair, Barrett Values Centre
 * Spirituality, Culture and Economic Development meeting (1995)
 * Faculty Members: SustainAbility
 * Be The Change
 * Wisdom Council, Center for World Spirituality

Related Sourcewatch

 * Marc Gafni