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Edition SEPTEMBER 2026

Editor’s Note Richard Barrett - The New Entrepreneur: Building Business on the Foundation of Human Values

The New Entrepreneur: Where Human Values Become the Foundation of Business What if the future of entrepreneurship is not about building faster, bigger, or more profitable businesses, but building businesses that are genuinely worth building? Richard Barrett has spent three decades exploring this question at the intersection of human values, leadership, culture, and organisational transformation. His journey from engineering and work at the World Bank to becoming a global thought leader has reinforced a powerful conviction: strategies and structures alone cannot transform organisations. Values do. In his latest book, The New Entrepreneur: Activating the Inner Architecture of Soul-aligned Entrepreneurship, Barrett challenges the traditional image of the entrepreneur driven by scale, speed, and financial return at any cost. He presents a different model, one where personal values shape culture, wellbeing, purpose, and ultimately business performance. For Barrett, culture is not what an organisation claims to value; it is what its leaders consistently reward and tolerate. In an era of AI, disruption, and changing workforce expectations, human qualities such as empathy, judgement, purpose, and self-awareness are becoming strategic advantages. His message is both timely and transformative: lasting businesses are built from the inside out. Editor-in-Chief The Entrepreneur Times Magazine

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RICHARD BARRETT MANAGING DIRECTOR BARRETT ACADEMY FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF HUMAN VALUES

HOW BUSINESSES THAT LEARN FASTER THAN THE MARKET ARE WINNING THE NEXT DECADE

DREW HANEY FOUNDER | ROOSTER CAPITAL LLC

HOW TRUST, TRANSPARENCY, AND STORYTELLING ARE BECOMING CORE BUSINESS ASSETS

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The New Entrepreneur: Building Business on the Foundation of Human Values

RICHARD BARRETT MANAGING DIRECTOR

BARRETT ACADEMY FOR

THE ADVANCEMENT OF HUMAN VALUES

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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 physical 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. 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/productpage/the-new-entrepreneur

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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 selfawareness 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.”

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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)

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DREW

HANEY BUILDING A LEGACY ROOTED IN

INTEGRITY, GRIT, AND VISION Founder | Rooster Capital LLC

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That philosophy carries over to every facet of Haney’s leadership style. Instead of micromanaging, he empowers. Instead of chasing shiny objects, he prays, pauses, and plays the long game. Faith, Family, and Freedom—The Cultural Compass Even in a decentralized, remote-ﬁrst business, Haney fosters culture with surgical precision and human warmth.

“Whether it’s texting daily, remembering birthdays, or praying with my partners—these aren’t tactics. They’re values,” he says. His leadership philosophy rejects transactional norms in favor of transformational relationships. “If I wouldn’t be friends with someone outside of work, I don’t want them in my business life either.” His calendar is tightly structured, his teams highly accountable, and his Saturdays sacred. “That’s family time,” he says. “I try not to even check my phone.”

SCALING WITH SOUL: THE NEXT CHAPTER FOR HANEY AND ROOSTER CAPITAL Looking ahead, Haney envisions bold growth—expanding Rooster Capital into larger, even international land development projects. But the heartbeat of his vision remains unchanged. “It’s about building something that outlives the deals,” he shares. His podcast, The Other Side of Enough, explores exactly that: finding purpose beyond success, and redefining what "enough" looks like in business and life. Haney’s leadership is no longer about being in every room or making every decision. “It’s about trusting the people I’ve trained and invested in,” he says. “If I get the relationship right, everything else flows.” Words to the Wise: Advice for Entrepreneurs and Veterans Alike When asked what he’d tell aspiring entrepreneurs or veterans stepping into the private sector, Haney doesn’t hesitate. “Never stop learning,” he says. “Be curious. Read, ask questions, and surround yourself with people outside your comfort zone. Think about what kind of life you want 10, 20 years from now—and reverse engineer it. The journey is just as important as the destination.” In a high-velocity industry, Drew Haney has built his empire on the rarest of currencies: character. From rural plots to high-stakes deals, he’s proving that success isn't about conquering land—it's about cultivating trust.

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Edition September 2026