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Charles L. Barker, JD

Chuck Barker has been providing negotiation and conflict management services for over twenty-five years. During that time he has enjoyed helping diverse clients in most regions of the world as an advisor, teacher, mediator, and negotiator. Mr. Barker also has taught negotiation and conflict management courses at law schools and seminaries, written articles, and created and/or appeared with Roger Fisher in interactive computer based training and numerous instructional videos based on Getting to YES and more recently emerging negotiation theory.

Currently, Mr. Barker's commercial focus is in health care, financial services, and management consulting. He is helping pharmaceutical, health care, and insurance clients improve their organizational negotiation capacity and results in negotiations with North American, European, Latin American and Middle Eastern payors, regulators, and providers. He also works with clients in the auditing, consulting, and financial services industries to manage difficult relationship negotiations prompted by various industry trends and U.S. legislation promoting corporate accountability. 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 his public sector work Mr. Barker serves as an advisor to the Justice, Peace and Reconciliation Committee of the Episcopal Church of Sudan with whom he is designing and will conduct instructional and mediation programs to help the society of southern Sudan return from over twenty years of civil war to peaceful civilian life. He is developing similar initiatives with clients in Kenya and Zimbabwe. Mr. Barker also is working on integrating formal negotiation and conflict management curriculum into seminary studies and the life of religious communities. Mr. Barker's research interests correspond closely to these projects. With the Harvard Negotiation Insight Initiative and the Hoffman Institute he is exploring the role of wisdom traditions, clinical psychological practice and religious belief in negotiation and conflict management. With an Episcopal priest and seminary professor of spirituality and church history, his wife, he also is working on a book about spirituality and conflict management within the Christian tradition. The authors are negotiating about whose name will appear first.

Before co-founding CMI Concord Group, Chuck Barker conducted his commercial practice for a decade as a partner of Conflict Management, Inc. ("CMI"), a spin-off of the Harvard Negotiation Project. He pursued his public sector work for clients such as the United Nations in Latin America and the various South African political parties and nongovernmental organizations as part of CMI's not-for-profit allied organization, Conflict Management Group - now part of Mercy Corps.  

Before joining CMI, Mr. Barker was an equity partner in the Litigation and Alternative Dispute Resolution Departments of Jenner & Block, a Chicago based firm of 400 attorneys, where he conducted numerous complex negotiations and all phases of trial and appellate litigation. Mr. Barker also served as a law clerk to United States District Judge Charles Joiner and to the Attorneys General of Minnesota and Massachusetts. He has taught negotiation and conflict management at Seabury Western Theological Seminary, DePaul University College of Law, John Marshall Law School, ITT Chicago-Kent College of Law, and in the Negotiation Seminar of the Program of Instruction for Lawyers at Harvard Law School. Mr. Barker received an A.B. degree from the University of Michigan and a J.D. degree from New York University School of Law. He participates in continuing education with the Harvard Negotiation Project, the Harvard Negotiation Insight Initiative and the Hoffman Institute.

Mr. Barker was practicing law in Chicago when he was enticed into the field of negotiation and conflict management by Prof. Roger Fisher in 1980. As an advisor to a board of directors on which Mr. Barker served, Prof. Fisher demonstrated the power of the negotiation theory then being developed at the newly founded Harvard Negotiation Project. For several years thereafter, Mr. Barker collaborated with Prof. Fisher on American Bar Association negotiation projects and studied with Prof. Fisher and Prof. Howard Raiffa at Harvard. In 1987 he withdrew from Jenner & Block to join Prof. Fisher, an opportunity for which he will be forever grateful.

When not on an airplane, Mr. Barker lives in Evanston and Hanover, Illinois, with his wife, Paula. They delight in their two daughters; Hannah, an English teacher in Singapore, and Claire, an archaeology and classical studies major at the University of Michigan.