Like any conventional business conference, the two-day Boston event pushes participants to choose from a smorgasbord of program options. But those options are far from typical. In one room is a panel discussion on "The Entrepreneur Walking Through the Dark Night of the Soul"; in another, a prayer meeting. Which will it be - the session on "Emotional Intelligence and Spiritual Leadership" or the one on "Wholeness, Meaning and Being Human at Work"? The morning tai chi session is essential for personal centering - but so is networking at the continental breakfast.
Barrett's agenda for the year is as jammed-full as the conference. His stop in Boston is just one pause on a multi-week itinerary that includes Minneapolis, San Francisco, Austin, and Washington, DC. Over the next few months, his work will take him to Oslo, London, and Istanbul. Yet despite his schedule, he plans to stay for both days of the Boston event. It's an exceptional chance for him to meet other people in this fast-growing field.
As he travels from one meeting to another, people stop him in the hall. "This is wonderful," says one woman. "This is exactly what I've been looking for." Barrett gives her a hug, as he does almost everyone he meets. But hugs aren't what draw the people who line up to get Barrett's email address. What attracts them is his clinical, almost scientific approach to a subject that all too often comes wrapped in a fog of quasi-mystical hokum and feel-good rhetoric. Barrett approaches his subject with all the sentimentality of a cost accountant, applying the numerical mentality that has ruled business since the first merchant started calculating the first profit. But he fuses that mentality with the spirit of qualitative change that is now sweeping through the world of work.
Most of the management models that companies have embraced in the past decade seek implicitly or explicitly to combine organizational and personal transformation. Barrett's program brings to this agenda a way to measure values that are at once nebulous and highly prized, including honesty, integrity, creativity, and fairness.
For consultants, spirituality in the workplace has become a growth stock. Almost anything can qualify, from a Bible-study lunch group to a generic goal-setting program that starts with a mission statement and seeks to connect personal purpose to actual work. The media have kept pace with the trend. The New York Times reported last year on its front page that the barriers between work and religion are crumbling. The newspaper noted a growing acceptance of overt religious behavior on the job: Koran study at Boeing, Torah classes at Microsoft, Islamic study groups at Intel.
The simple fact is, more and more people at more and more companies are flocking to any program that helps them connect what they do for the bottom line to what they value most deeply. Most such programs circle around these issues in ways that appeal more to human-resources departments than to CEOs: They take a part of business that already gets labeled "the soft stuff," and they treat it in a soft way. Barrett tries to cut the issue on the diagonal, to marry the soft stuff with hard measurements: statistical analyses, charts, survey data.
And Barrett is also distinctly capitalistic. To him, the question is not whether a company should make money but what it should do with that money. Nor does he clothe his message in feel-good promises or talk of win-win emotions. Anyone who embraces the idea of spirituality in the workplace needs to prepare for pain, at least in the short term. "This is not work for the timid of heart," Barrett says. "The benefits of it are immeasurable. Yet it requires personal struggle. Only when you change internally will you see those benefits reflected in the outside world. You have to go through a process, and it's painful. You have to show up fearlessly."
The story of Barrett's own career matches that of this emerging combination of spirituality and pragmatism, of personal growth and economic success. Throughout his 30-year work life, Barrett has been successful at everything he has tried. Yet his personal journey is an almost textbook case of seeking and of suffering, of succeeding and of fleeing success - the story of a bottom-line-oriented businessman who has consistently put himself on the line.
He began his career in 1967, working as a transportation planner for the municipality of Leicester, England. In 1969, he joined Freeman Fox and Associates, a highly regarded engineering-consulting firm in Great Britain. Soon he became an associate - the youngest in the company. When he was only 26, the firm sent him to Paris to open a new office, and within two years, he found himself hiring and supervising a 16-person staff. The work got more demanding, but the perks improved: He had a company car and an apartment on the Left Bank, with a view of Notre Dame Cathedral. He was a raging success. And he was acutely unhappy.
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