Today we’d like to introduce you to Charles Barker.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
Through an education program at my rabble rousing church in 1960s Detroit, I became aware at an early age that I had a vocation in conflict management. At the time, I didn’t know what “process” was. By my college years at the University of Michigan, I thought the answer was to enter the priesthood of democracy – a law school. So I attended New York University School of Law, clerked for U.S. District Judge Charles W. Joiner, and joined Jenner & Block in Chicago as a trial attorney.
Along the way I married and became the delighted father of two daughters and a partner in the firm. But, outside of my family life, I wasn’t happy and I wasn’t satisfied. I consulted an all-in-one friend who happened to be a Jesuit, ethics professor, and Harvard trained lawyer. Over a period of several years, several retreats, and many conversations I discerned aspirations beyond the practice of law and accepted the importance of being happy as well as successful.
Fortunately, during my discernment process the notion of “alternative dispute resolution” became a trend within the legal profession and my future mentor, Roger Fisher, founded the Harvard Negotiation Project and published his first book, Getting to Yes, with Bill Ury. Roger and I met through activities in the American Bar Foundation. I hired his new consulting firm to train my Jenner & Block lawyers and he recruited me to join Conflict Management, Inc.
That was over 35 years ago. Since then I have been, sadly, divorced. Even expertise in conflict management and collaboration can’t turn all situations into happy endings – an important lesson for all negotiators. Happily, I have remarried – thereby acquiring 5 additional children to join my first two daughters the Medieval historian and the archaeologist. My wife, Alison Dalton, is first violin in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra – thoroughly spoiling me with access to some of the most beautiful music and performances in the history of humankind. Through some very scary and profoundly productive work with the Hoffman Institute in the interim, I was able to let go of a great deal of unproductive emotions and assumptions about myself, engage more deeply and directly in my vocation and, biggest surprise of all, to discover that I had a second vocation. I’m a bonsai and suiseki artist when I’m not running PrimeMover.
PrimeMover and its predecessor firms have taken me around the world more times than I can count. My colleagues and I have had a role in negotiating the constitutional democracy of South Africa; reducing violence among tribes in Southern Sudan; coordinating Iraqi tribal leaders, Arabs and Kurds, Sunni and Shi’a authorities and political and civil leaders to promote a unified government after the second Gulf War; and aligning members of the Syrian opposition to the Asad regime in Syria. I have advised leaders of fortune 100 insurers, banks, pharmaceutical companies, health care organizations, consulting firms, and tech companies on the formation and execution of their business strategies and internal management. I have worked with major religious, union, governmental and academic leaders to resolve dissension within their organizations. The photo I included was of an Episcopal Bishop in Renk, Southern Sudan, enacting a “hold up” by the Lord’s Resistance Army as an example of how to handle some “difficult negotiations” being discussed by the tribal leaders depicted in one of the follow-on photos.
Along the way, I haven’t usually gotten what I set out to achieve. Instead, results are often better than I expect because of what I learn from my clients and our negotiating partners and what we end up creating together. It turns out that with good collaborative theory, skill, and personal resilience, one can regularly do better than seems possible. Although I’m still a recovering attorney, I love what I do. It’s much better than working for a living. And, one of these days soon, I will open up my suiseki studio in Chicago – as soon as I can figure out which two consecutive weeks I can be in town to move in.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
A traveler in Medieval France came upon three similar craftsmen on the road southwest of Paris. One was struggling uphill and cursing a cart filled with stone. He complained that he had many other loads to deliver to a building site before dusk or incur the wrath of his employer. The second, pushing a similarly loaded cart up another hill with calm determination, reported that he was a stone mason’s apprentice looking forward to his promotion to Master once the building was finished. The third, singing while he pushed his overloaded cart, paused to explain that he was blessed to be working on the greatest monument to God ever built – Chartres Cathedral.
Yes, there have been struggles. Struggles to leave our successful professions (I was a litigation partner at Jenner & Block in Chicago) and start a firm using a new technology, with no long-term clients, on a whimsical notion that collaboration should be as valuable and effective as conflict. Struggles to have it all; research and publication fame; consulting fortune; and pro bono satisfaction. Struggles to manage radically different businesses of advice, training, and mediation in the same company. Struggles to harness the incompatible strategies of diverse founders into a single partnership. Struggles to be parents and/or spouses at home while dispensing advice and training on longer and longer business trips in some very dicy places. Struggles to discern and realize our aspirations without failing at pedestrian tasks like navigating the “Death Valley” of all successful consulting firms – the administration of growth that takes more and more of the founder’s time away from client service.
They all have been high quality problems. Without one, we wouldn’t have learned and grown into the next one. The struggle has been a ladder to learning, professional satisfaction, and achievement.
So, as you know, we’re impressed with PrimeMover – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
PrimeMover is an international collaboration and conflict management firm. We change the way our clients deal with differences, be they religious, commercial, political, ethnic or otherwise. PrimeMover troubleshoots failing systems integration projects for global IT consulting firms. We enable healing dialogue among conflicting tribes and co-religionists. We improve the terms by which life sciences companies and government regulators treat deadly disease. We guide acquisition and divesture negotiations, corporate strategy alignment among executives, and the creation of collaborative commercial environments. We teach stakeholders how to capture the value of collaboration for their entire health care system, business enterprise, or academic institution.
We restore collaborative working relationships damaged by conflict. We employ diversity as an engine of innovation and value creation. We engender the personal congruence of our clients with their values and build the resilience they need to persist and succeed when the going gets tough.
Our heritage is from the Harvard Negotiation Project (“Project”) and its co-founder, our mentor, and Chicago native, the late Roger Fisher. After serving in WWII as a weather reconnaissance pilot, Roger worked on the Marshall Plan in Paris under W. Averell Harriman. He emerged from these experiences and later work with the Solicitor General of the United States and on the faculty of Harvard Law School seeking a better way than carpet bombing to deal with conflict.
For this purpose, he founded the Project and enlisted students and colleagues to join him in conducting extensive research, publishing many best-selling books on negotiation, and advising and training leaders and negotiators world-wide. Perhaps Roger’s best-known book about negotiation, co-authored with William Ury, is Getting to Yes. His most recent publication before his passing, with co-author Daniel Shapiro, was Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate.
In response to the Project and Getting to Yes, Roger Fisher enterprises grew beyond the Williston Professor of Law at Harvard. To cope with the diplomatic and commercial demands, Roger and his colleagues founded non-profit and for-profit consulting firms starting in the mid-1980s that evolved into thousands of publications and hundreds of academic programs, institutes, and consulting firms. PrimeMover is one such firm that continues to add its members’ acumen, research, and practice to the field of collaboration and conflict management.
Today PrimeMover works globally in many contexts. Our clients include Fortune 100 companies, tech start-ups, and professions; national political leaders and insurgent groups; labor and management; universities and elementary schools; and religious and public interest organizations. We advise, facilitate and mediate. We teach, coach, and mentor. Our clients get better transactional results, build better relationships, transform their organizations and environments, and grow into more self-actualized people.
Our accomplishments are satisfying. But, we have a lot more to learn. Collaboration is a growth industry. We are eager to find out what tomorrow brings.
So, what’s next? Any big plans?
We have six wonderful opportunities ahead. One is to engage the stakeholders across the health care sector of an entire country in making the delivery of health care more collaborative. The key leaders have said “yes.” An indigenous convener at a prestigious academic institution stands ready to form a governance committee. The first, formal activities are scheduled. Over the next five years we look forward to so transform the relationships and results of the system that it will set a precedent other country, and other sectors, are eager to adopt.
Another opportunity is to create augmented intelligence software that teaches users how to negotiate collaboratively. Similar software can help organizations evaluate whether or not to negotiate and support their negotiators in real time as they seek to collaborate with others. Successful versions of such software might eventually lead to the equivalent of a political party with no candidate; an internet “town” forum in which each person can share constructively framed information with millions of their fellow citizens to generate informed opinion that no politician dare disregard.
Third and fourth opportunities are to help bring new, renewable sources of energy generation and computing speed into common use through startup companies called WaterRotor and Optalysys, respectively. Through WaterRotor, a hydroelectric generation device that works in slow moving streams, hundreds of millions of people who live with no electricity can have better jobs, education, health care, and communication with the broader world. Through Optalysys, a laser based computing technology, scientists will acquire a new, powerful tool to plot the human genome, predict the weather, and unravel national defense requirements compatibly with the privacy of citizens.
The fifth opportunity is to build sustainable, expert collaboration capability within a few key global clients. My goal is for them to transform their client relationships, the markets to which they contribute and, eventually, their industries. We’ve been at it for four years in one case and are beginning to see dramatic results in the most versatile stakeholders. I’m thinking that for the next few years I’ll feel like Eliza Doolittle at Ascot.
Finally, we have the opportunity to expand our organizational capability and legacy. We have added an office in London and look forward in the next few years to adding more colleagues and capabilities through our clients.
So much to do. So little time.
Contact Info:
- Phone: 847 644 2494
- Email: cb@primemover.ch
Image Credit:
Charles Barker
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