Customer Reviews

Building a Values-Driven Organization: A Whole System Approach to Cultural Transformation

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Many of us read Richard Barrett's best-selling book, Liberating the Corporate Soul, and admired his visionary and soul nurturing approaches to building sustainable and enduring organisations. Now he has given birth to another major leap forward in how to develop and sustain values-based organisations. In this new book, Richard demonstrates again his genius at delivering clear conceptual and experience-based thinking on organisation culture as a new frontier of competitive advantage. Building on his experience in carrying out over 600 cultural values assessments in 35 countries, he shows how to build full-spectrum consciousness in leaders and organizations and how to carry out whole-system change to meet the challenges of accelerating change, deepening complexity and growing systemic risks.
George Starcher, President, European Baha'i Business Forum

Richard Barrett again does an outstanding job of clearly stating his main points, then building on them with facts and good examples. He is able to expertly blend some of the key principles of other authors -- Ken Wilbur and Don Beck -- with some of his material. The text provides some excellent evaluation tools, both for individuals and organizations. He references a number of websites for additional clarity of some of his points. He has an excellent reference list at the end of the book. Anyone who is looking at leadership and organizational values/vision/mission will do well to read this timely book.

Harry Owens, Jr., MD, MIM

Richard does another excellent job describing the seven levels of consciousness model and how this framework can be used to effectively measure an organization's culture. This process provides a values-based approach within a whole system perspective. Regardless of the status of an organziation's cultural health, this whole system approach provides the opportunity to integrate where an organization is (its current strengths, opportunities, systems and resources) and provides a map to get to where the organization wants to be. A great book that helps make sense of the complexity of organizational culture and how to improve it. Nice work!

I have become a Richard Barrett fan because of this book.

Barrett delves deep into his Seven Levels of Consciousness model in this book. It is applicable equally to individuals, small organizational units, small and large businesses, and nations. Values-driven practitioners will find this a gem of a resource and an easy enough read to digest.
Of particular note are his Cultural Transformation Tools, which can be leveraged to assess the values and/or organizational consciousness of a business.

Barrett will soon release a tome of a book tentatively titled "Love, Fear, and the Destiny of Nations." This is a follow-up to this and his previous works and should prove to be an excellent composition of all his endeavors.

The model of the seven levels of consciousness and the concept of full-spectrum consciousness are brilliant. They can be used for personal growth, leadership development and organizational changes. The framework for the whole-system change is very practical and applicable. I particularly like the four-why process of creating vision and mission for an organization. This book supports me to coach leaders more effectively.

Richard Barrett presents an excellent, well grounded model to help individuals who lead organizations effectively evolve through their personal and collective stages of development. He provides not only a framework for understanding, but also practical tools to assess the current situation, desired goals, and measurement instruments to get from concept to completion.

This was a really, really irritating book, because I was sure he knew better. He packed his text with needless jargon, plus dozens of acronyms made up just for this book, many of them so nearly alike that it's hard to remember which one means what. If that weren't bad enough, just when he comes to a critical piece of information, he writes, "you'll find this in my previous book," or "I'll cover this in my forthcoming book." There are a lot of diagrams, and they are easier to understand than the text--at least the acronyms are labeled--but they could have been a lot better as well.
The topic is vital. Nothing prevented the author, Richard Barrett, from writing a really good book. Maybe he thought clarity would hurt his credibility.
In short, while there is some valuable information in the book, he makes you struggle for every bit of it. If you have to read jargon every day in the course of your job, maybe his won't especially bother you, but I found it infuriating.