ABOUT

The same argument, from a factory floor in Rochester to a workbook in Zephyrhills.

Business needs a soul. I was making that case long before I could prove it — the paperwork starts in 1993.

Kevin Barrett is an Australian-American business trainer and strategist based in Zephyrhills, Florida. He joined 3M in Rochester, New York in July 1966 and left as Senior International Technical Marketing Manager in September 1987, then founded KJ Barrett & Associates, which he has run in every year since — in Australia through 2003 and from the same Zephyrhills address since 2002. His earliest surviving course text is dated February 1993. He coined the term Creation Society, first evidenced in a document dated 25 February 2000, and the operating principle Formation over Extraction. The dated record is at thecreatrepreneur.com/record.

Why I do this

I’m Kevin Barrett. I train and advise business owners, I write the Creatrepreneur Chronicles, and I sit on the advisory boards of two education companies. This page is the long answer to why.

I went to work for 3M in July 1966 as a quality control foreman in Rochester, New York, and left twenty-one years later as Senior International Technical Marketing Manager. I have never worked for anyone else since.

In 1969 I became quality assurance supervisor at that Rochester plant, and we rebuilt two product lines from the statistics up. In under two years, customer complaints fell from over 300 per ten thousand square feet to 0.05. Manufacturing write-offs fell from $250,000 a year to under $20,000. Nobody was replaced and nobody was retrained. We changed the process.

3M taught me that as a curriculum — Juran, Shewhart, Deming, Feigenbaum and Crosby, alongside probability and statistics, design of experiment, and statistical quality control. I was studying chemical engineering by correspondence and statistics at Rochester Institute of Technology at the same time, at night, while doing the job.

Most failure lives in the system, not in the person standing in front of you.

I have never found an exception — not in a factory, not in a classroom, not anywhere.

Between 1973 and 1977 I sat between 3M’s research lab and its factory, on the scale-up team that commercialised three new products. Here is what one of them looked like. We sold two films that did different jobs in the same darkroom, and operators kept making mistakes in the dark. Rather than train people harder, we rebuilt the products as three systems: one for the darkroom, balanced to the same speed and exposure so a mistake became difficult to make; one for yellow light; and one for white light, where you no longer needed a darkroom at all. The error wasn’t managed. It was designed out.

Those three products came to carry twenty per cent of the division’s sales volume and half its profit.

In 1977 3M sent me to Ferrania, in Italy, to move the European source of supply from the United States. I stayed nearly three years running technical service across Europe for graphic arts and colour proofing.

Somewhere in those 3M years I was sent to Tulsa to work with a salesman called Jim Fox who was missing targets that kept moving. I took his order book off him and told him to go and see his customers and ask how he could help. Don’t sell. Forty days later Jim Fox was hitting his numbers.

That is the whole of Formation over Extraction, long before I had a name for it. At the time I just thought it was how you sell.

The year it got personal

I left 3M in September 1987 and started KJ Barrett & Associates the same month. Within a year I was in Sydney.

From June 1992 I spent four years running training for people the long Australian recession had thrown out of work, across the whole of New South Wales, for the Commonwealth Employment Service. Over two thousand of them. Not a seminar — months at a time, accelerated learning, and the only measure that counted was whether they had jobs at the end. Better than seven in ten did.

1992 was the year I crossed from fixing systems to forming people, and I never crossed back.

My earliest surviving copyright is from a few months in: The Psychology of Achievement, February 1993. Viktor Frankl was in the curriculum from the beginning. He still is — there is a page on this site about why.

The words I use

In a paper dated 25 February 2000 I wrote that Peter Drucker’s Knowledge Society was giving way to something else, and I called it the Creation Society — because information has to become knowledge, and knowledge has to create.

Creatrepreneur came out of the same thinking: someone who builds with entrepreneurial discipline and creative formation, and who asks not only will it scale but does my work heal or harm.

Underneath both sits one operating principle. Formation over Extraction. Extraction takes value out of people and relationships — vague terms, chased payments, funnels dressed up as gifts. Formation builds value in. That is the whole argument. Everything else on this site is a method for doing it on purpose.

Each term has a definition, a date where one can be evidenced, and an honest note where one cannot. They are in the Lexicon.

What I do when nobody is paying me

He was a freshman. An injury ahead of him in the depth chart had just made him a starter, in the biggest game of our season, and he was frightened.

I put my arm around his shoulder pads. He played well. We won.

That photograph is the closest thing I have to an explanation of the last twenty years. I came back to Florida in 2003 and the first thing I did was go looking for a basketball game. I found one at the East Pasco YMCA — then I was coaching there, and a couple of years later I was on the board, and on the Greater Tampa oversight committee after that.

From 2011 I coached youth sport across Pasco County — Wesley Chapel, Zephyrhills High, R.B. Stewart Middle — and then ten years at Academy At the Lakes alongside Eddie Oyakhilome. Football, soccer, track, cross country, basketball, baseball. My consultancy sat dormant the entire time. I do not regret a single year of it.

There are championships in there somewhere. They are not what I remember.

That one I do remember. A state championship for grades, awarded to a team I coached. Everything I believe about sport is in that plaque: you are not building athletes, you are building people who happen to play.

I have been at the Rotary Club of Zephyrhills since 2014, arguing for something specific — that Rotary reclaim its own business-networking roots. Serve the community and build a business. Those were never opposites.

The full record — every engagement, dated, with the artifact beside it → /record

What I actually believe

Best for All Concerned — Before you act, weigh People, Planet, Profit and Purpose together. Not perfection. A discipline of consideration.

SOULutions — Solve the problem at the level it started: Shared humanity, Overcoming trauma, Unity of purpose, Long-term interdependence.

Co-Elevation — Human and artificial intelligence rising together, out in the open. The assistant on this site is a working example, and it says so when you ask.

Where to start

If any of this sounds like the business you are trying to build, start where everyone starts — a free Self & Strategy Audit, and an honest look at where you actually are.

Last updated 19 September 2026. Corrections to this page are logged at /record.