Charles Barker is the Managing Director of PrimeMover Associates and a partner in CMI Concord Group, Inc., international firms dedicated to collaboration and conflict management. Both firms are spinoffs of the Harvard Negotiation Project. For over forty years Mr. Barker has advised, taught, coached, and mediated for business, governmental, public interest, academic, and religious organizations world-wide. He has served as a member of the Research Faculty of the Uppsala University Faculty of Law and a Visiting Professor in collaborative negotiation at the London School of Economics. He also teaches at other law schools, seminaries, and private universities; publishes; and has created and appears with the late Roger Fisher in instructional videos and DVDs based on Getting to YES and more recently emerging collaborative negotiation theory.

Mr. Barker’s commercial focus is on health care, financial services, and management consulting. He helps national health care systems, life science companies, governmental agencies, hospitals, patient advocacy groups, HTAs, and payers to build their collaborative negotiation capacity and transform their health care systems in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. He works with clients in the consulting and financial services industries to transform their internal negotiation protocols, their long-term working relationships, and their most challenging negotiations. From 1998 through 2002, Mr. Barker served as Senior Advisor to the CEO of Health Care Service Corporation (d/b/a Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois, Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico) on merger, provider relations, governance, and related negotiations.

In the public sector, Mr. Barker has worked with Mercy Corps in post-war Iraq on democratic governance; Norwegian People’s Aid assisting the Syrian Opposition; Artistic Circles on water scarcity issues; the Justice, Peace, and Reconciliation Committee of the Episcopal Church of Sudan on religious and tribal disputes; The Duke Center for International Development training government officials in emerging economies; and the United Nations Development Program on international mining disputes. Mr. Barker also works on integrating formal collaboration and conflict management instruction into business, legal, and seminary graduate studies. His research interests correspond to these projects.

Mr. Barker is a United States citizen residing in Chicago. He has two children. He received his AB degree from the University of Michigan, a J.D. from New York University School of Law, and postgraduate certification in negotiation through Harvard Negotiation Project at Harvard Law School. He clerked for the Hon. Charles W. Joiner in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois and the Attorneys General of Minnesota and Massachusetts, and practiced trial law as a partner in the Chicago firm of Jenner & Block.