Richard Barrett

Richard Barrett (born 7 March 1945), 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 (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. 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 (from 1967 to 1997) Barrett spent most of his spare time studying psychology, spirituality, physics, and personal transformation. He left the World Bank in 1997 to create the management consulting firm of Richard Barrett & Associates (which became the Barrett Values Centre in 2007). 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."