Paul Cramer

Paul Cramer is one of the three co-founders of CMI Concord. For a number of years, he served as Co-Lead for the Accenture Negotiations Center of Excellence. As a  negotiation and mediation specialist, he has advised individuals, corporate executives, government officials,  non-governmental organizations, and labor representatives on the most  appropriate strategy for complex, multi-party negotiations. Whether facilitating a merger, advising on a transaction, settling a lawsuit, or mediating a labor/management contract, he has worked with key executives to build an "interests-based" negotiation strategy that will  satisfy all parties better than walking away.

Mr. Cramer has a great breadth of negotiation, mediation, and facilitation experience in both the private and public sectors.  He has facilitated complex multi-party negotiations in the health care  arena (e.g., forced merger discussions among Sunnybrook Health Science  Centre, Women's College Hospital, and Orthopaedic and Arthritic Hospital  in Ontario). He has helped settle complex litigation (e.g., the Lipton  Tennis Tournament, Dade County, Matheson family dispute). He has  facilitated restructuring negotiations for large commercial transactions  (e.g., the restructuring of logistics for the shipment of western  Canadian grain), and he has jointly-trained and mediated between  formerly antagonistic parties (e.g., the Newton Teachers Association and  the City of Newton).

In the international arena, Mr. Cramer has worked on several complex and important public-policy situations. He facilitated a week-long working session on non-violent problem solving with international diplomats from the former Soviet Union (e.g., a workshop with two  officials from each former "republic" in Helsinki, Finland). He works  with Duke's Center for International Development to build the skills of  those who negotiation foreign aid (e.g., sessions with the Masters of  Foreign Aid program both in Raleigh, NC and Capetown, South Africa). He  has taught sessions at Harvard University, Columbia University, Duke  University and University of South Africa in Capetown.

Mr. Cramer has trained and coached negotiators at large corporations  (e.g., Accenture, KPMG, Johnson and Johnson, Bank of America, IBM, MTV  Networks) and smaller ones (e.g., Simpson Industries, Stackpole  Industries, American Physicians, and Elkem Metals). He has worked with  bar associations, corporate legal departments and prestigious law firms  (e.g., Florida Bar Association, the legal departments of Bank of America  and Mobil Oil).  Mr. Cramer's work has taken him around the United States, as well as to some 30+ countries in Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin and South  America.

As a negotiation specialist, Mr. Cramer worked closely with the late Professor Roger Fisher, author of Getting to YES and founder of the Harvard Negotiation Project, since 1984. Following  his work at the Harvard Negotiation Project, Mr. Cramer joined CMI as a  consultant. He has worked as Executive Producer with Professor Fisher to  turn the interests-based negotiation "technology" into award-winning  videotapes: Getting to YES: The Video Workshop on Negotiation, Five Skills For Getting a YES, and Getting Schools to YES, and the computer-based interactive CD-ROM, YES! The Interactive Negotiator (winner of the Gold Award for Excellence in E-Learning in 1998). He has  created numerous in-house videotapes for clients as well as CBT on  collaborative negotiation. Mr. Cramer continues to teach negotiation  skills to individuals and groups around the world.

Before joining Accenture and founding CMI Concord, Mr. Cramer worked  as a journalist for ABC News and Newsday. In 1982 he and his brother, a  research physicist at Stanford University, co-founded Radial Structure  Inc., a small software company that promoted the use of EXAFS analysis  to determine crystalline structures. Mr. Cramer is a graduate of  Middlebury College and Harvard Law School.