My path to this work was never a straight line, and I have come to see that as the point rather than the problem. I trained as an engineer, then spent years at the World Bank helping governments think about development at the scale of nations. It was there, watching institutions with enormous resources fail to improve the lives of the people they were meant to serve, that I first understood a truth that has shaped everything since: structures and strategies do not transform anything on their own. Values do.
An organisation, a government, a business, is only ever as coherent as the values of the people who run it and the culture those values create. That single realisation redirected my career from infrastructure to human infrastructure, and every chapter since, building the Cultural Transformation Tools, founding the Barrett Academy, writing more than forty books, has been an extension of that first insight rather than a departure from it.
Three decades ago, values-driven leadership was a fringe idea. Business schools taught strategy, finance and operations, and treated culture as a soft afterthought, something for the human resources department rather than the boardroom. I focused on values because I could see, long before the data existed to prove it, that culture is not downstream of performance, it is upstream of it.
An organisation cannot sustain excellence on a foundation of fear, extraction or misalignment between what people say and what they do. Measuring values gave leaders a mirror. Once they could see the gap between their stated values and their lived culture, real change became possible, because you cannot transform what you refuse to measure.
That same conviction sits behind my new book, The New Entrepreneur: Activating the Inner Architecture of Soul-aligned Entrepreneurship.
Get the book: https://www.richardbarrettauthor.com/product-page/the-new-entrepreneur
I wrote it because the entrepreneurial story we have been telling for a generation, the lone founder chasing scale and exit at any cost, is running out of road. It produces extraordinary wealth for a few and burnout, broken teams and depleted communities for many more. The gap it addresses is this: entrepreneurship education has taught people how to build a business, but not how to build a business that is worth building, one that can hold its founder’s wellbeing, its people’s dignity and its wider impact in the same frame as its growth targets. As I put it in the book, “The entrepreneur is not a role, it is an evolutionary impulse embodied.” That gap is not a niche concern. It is becoming the central question of this generation of founders.
A New Entrepreneur is not defined by what they build but by what they build it upon. The traditional entrepreneur treats growth and financial return as the primary measures of success, with everything else, culture, purpose, wellbeing, treated as a cost to be managed once the business can afford it.
The New Entrepreneur inverts that order. They start from an honest inventory of their own values, build a culture that expresses those values from the first hire, and treat financial performance as one outcome among several rather than the only one that counts. This is not a rejection of ambition or profit. It is a recognition that ambition without an inner foundation collapses the moment it meets real pressure, and pressure always comes. In the book I write that your inner state “is not preparation for business, it is the business,” because everything a company eventually becomes, its culture, its decisions, its resilience, is shaped first by the state of the person building it.
That is the practical heart of the book. Founders today are navigating uncertainty, rapid technological disruption and a workforce, particularly younger employees, that expects far more from an employer than a salary. The businesses that survive this environment are not the ones with the cleverest strategy but the ones with the deepest coherence between what the founder values, what the culture rewards and what the business actually does in the world.
One of the chapters is built entirely around unlearning the belief that busyness equals worth, what I call the death of hustle and the rise of harmony. As I write there, “Don’t confuse speed with success. You are not here to prove. You are here to attune.” I offer founders a simple but demanding discipline: know your personal values before you write a business plan, because the business plan will eventually be tested by your values whether you have examined them or not. Entrepreneurs who skip that step often build fast and fracture just as fast.
Identifying core values is simpler in principle than in practice. Most founders can list what they admire in the abstract, integrity, innovation, care for people, but struggle to name the values that actually govern their decisions under stress. I ask entrepreneurs to look at their hardest choices of the past year, the ones that cost them something, and ask what they were protecting when they made them. That is where real values live, not in a mission statement but in a track record of trade-offs. The book has a chapter on listening as the starting discipline of vision, and its closing line captures the shift I ask founders to make: “You are not here to force. You are here to receive.” Once a founder can articulate their values honestly, the task becomes translating them into the mechanics of the business: how people are hired, how decisions are made, what gets celebrated and what gets quietly tolerated. Culture is not what is written on the wall. It is what is rewarded in the room.
The most common leadership mistake I see, across multinational corporations and early-stage ventures alike, is mistaking authority for coherence. Leaders assume that because they hold the title, their stated values are automatically the organisation’s lived values. They are not.
Every organisation carries what I call its Shadow, the gap between the values it claims and the behaviours it actually reinforces, and that Shadow grows in silence when leaders are not willing to look at it. In the book I trace this back to what I call the wound of the builder, the sense of being simultaneously too much and not enough, too visionary, too fast, too idealistic, and not conventional or credible enough. Left unexamined, that wound is what drives the second mistake: leaders solve for the symptom, disengagement, attrition, a toxic team, rather than the underlying misalignment that produced it. You cannot coach your way out of a Coherence problem.
Artificial intelligence intensifies rather than resolves these questions. As automation absorbs more of the technical and analytical work, the distinctly human contributions, judgement, empathy, meaning-making, purpose, become the actual differentiators of a business rather than a pleasant extra. Leaders who understand this will use technology to free their people for more human work, deeper relationships with customers, more creative problem solving, more genuine care for one another.
Leaders who do not will use technology to strip the human element out entirely, and they will build organisations that are efficient and hollow at the same time. I write in the book that the systems supporting a business need to be able to bend without breaking, what I call structure that breathes rather than structure that controls, and that discipline matters more, not less, as automation reshapes what a business actually needs its people for. The businesses that thrive over the next decade will be the ones that treat AI as a tool for expanding human contribution, not replacing it.
This is also why I have spent so much of my career building instruments to measure cultural health, because what gets measured gets managed, and for too long the only things reliably measured in business were financial. Cultural health is not a nice-to-have sitting beside revenue and profitability. It is a leading indicator of both. An organisation with high internal alignment and low internal friction consistently outperforms one that is technically well-resourced but culturally fractured, because so much of a fractured culture’s energy is consumed by internal conflict rather than external value creation. The entrepreneurs who will define the next decade are the ones who treat cultural measurement with the same rigour they bring to financial reporting.
Across every leader I have advised, from heads of global institutions to first-time founders, the quality that consistently separates the truly exceptional from the merely successful is self-awareness under pressure. Anyone can lead well when conditions are easy. What reveals a leader’s actual development is how they behave when the business is threatened, when they are afraid, when their identity is on the line.
I describe this in the book as courage as currency, not boldness for its own sake but “a quiet willingness to proceed without external validation.” Exceptional leaders have done the inner work to recognise their own reactive patterns before those patterns run the organisation for them. This is why I believe, and why the book argues at length, that organisational transformation always begins with individual transformation. A founder cannot build a coherent culture from an incoherent inner life. Purpose becomes genuinely lived, rather than merely communicated, only when the people setting direction have done enough of their own development to lead from clarity rather than compensation.
My advice to young entrepreneurs who want lasting social impact alongside commercial success is to resist the pressure to treat these as competing goals that must eventually be traded off against one another. They are not in tension when the business is built correctly from the start. Impact that is bolted on after the fact, a foundation, a giving pledge, a sustainability report, will always feel secondary and will be the first thing cut under pressure. Impact that is built into the business model, into who you hire, what you sell and how you treat the people and communities your business touches, becomes structurally impossible to abandon. I put it this way in the book: a good boundary is not a wall, it is a riverbank, it gives shape to movement rather than stopping it. Build the values in at the foundation, not the finish.
Looking ahead, I believe the defining trend of the next decade will be the collapse of the old separation between doing good and doing well.
Consumers, employees and increasingly investors are converging on the same expectation, that businesses demonstrate genuine coherence between their stated purpose and their actual conduct. Entrepreneurs who prepare for this by doing the inner work now, rather than treating it as reputational insurance to acquire later, will have a durable advantage. Through the Barrett Academy, the Humanity Awareness Initiative and now The New Entrepreneur, my hope is simply to leave behind a set of tools and a body of evidence that make this way of building business not just aspirational but practical, so that the founders coming after me have a clearer path than I did toward businesses, and lives, built on a foundation that can actually hold their weight. The book closes with the line I most want readers to carry with them: “You are not just building a business, you are opening a doorway to a more coherent world.”
About Richard Barrett
Richard Barrett is a global thought leader in values-based leadership and organisational transformation, and an inspirational keynote speaker sought after by executives and organisations worldwide. Founder of the Barrett Academy for the Advancement of Human Values and creator of the Cultural Transformation Tools, he has spent thirty years pioneering the study of how values, Consciousness and Coherence shape the organisations people lead. He is the author of more than forty books, including Silences that Shape Organisations, Leaders Under Pressure, The New Leader, The New Organisation and The New HR Executive, alongside his wider body of work exploring the psychology of leadership, culture and organisational performance. He is also publisher of The Evolutionary Journal on Substack. His work has influenced leaders and institutions across the globe, establishing him as one of the foremost voices connecting human development with organisational performance.
Substack: https://barrettvalues.substack.com/
Website: www.richardbarrettauthor.com
Email: barrettvalues@gmail.com
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Barrett_(author)