A great, concise presentation by Richard Barrett of The Barrett Academy for the Advancement of Values speaking about the importance of values and how it relates to the vertical development of not just people but organizations and nations as well.
What are values?
Richard Barrett
They are the energetic drivers of our aspirations and intentions.
It’s interesting because I saw an article the other day talking about how Mark Carney, the new Liberal leader of Canada, wants to transform Canada using a similar approach with business organizations being at the forefront of this change.
What’s interesting is that the person writing the article laughed this off because they believed that businesses aren’t interested in this, since corporate governance has been around for decades and not much has changed.
That person is right.
In fact, even Richard Barrett himself mentioned above that he was saying that “cultural capital was the new frontier of competitive advantage” over twenty years ago and it’s still a new frontier because “it’s taking a while to sink in.”
But that’s the whole problem and why we are in the mess we are in.
Most mainstream business organizations today are not interested in these things because they don’t see them as driving needs that they care about, thus they don’t value them as values.
This is exactly why most business leaders today have an almost complete disconnect with their employees. The leaders needs often do not resonate with their employees needs, thus creating a misaligned relationship between the organizational “mind” and the organizational “body.”
This is why both business leaders and organizations need to change and evolve as a whole, thus allowing nations themselves to change and evolve as a whole. Even more so since business organizations are on par or even exceed nations in influencing the world today, especially via technology.
In effect, this all starts from the bottom up. You can’t transform an organization or nation, if you can’t transform the individuals first, starting with its leaders.
That’s because you have to lead by example.
With this in mind, it will be interesting to see how Mark Carney runs his cabinet and if he implements practices within it that embody his own personal values, as well as the overall values of Canadians.
Perhaps most of all, it would be interesting if he unified Canada with a purpose and direction by clearly articulating these Canadian values (and how they differ from the US government’s values at the moment).