About Us > Mark Gerzon

Founder and President

Mark Gerzon helps leaders and their organizations learn skills that are critical for dealing with conflict and leading across difficult social divides. He specializes in enhancing the capacity of competing groups and divided organizations to find alignment around shared goals and values. He has conducted leadership trainings and lectured throughout the world.

In the private sector, he has worked with companies ranging major consumer products and high technology industries, and with business organizations such as the Conference Board. In the public sector, he has extensive experience consulting with public sector organizations such as the US House of Representatives or the United Nations Development Program. With all these diverse clients, his mission remains constant: to foster the emergence of leaders who know how to build bridges across differences, rather than walls that reinforce them.

For the past two decades, as President of Mediators Foundation, Mark Gerzon has directed or supported a wide range of projects focused on building a more just, peaceful and sustainable world. Both his work between the former Soviet Union and the United States (which catalyzed an end of the Cold War between the two superpowers' film industries), and then his work designing two successful Bipartisan Congressional Retreats, are examples of his approach to conflict transformation.

His primary international work has been as co-chair of the Global Leadership Network, a group of more than two dozen leadership experts and practitioners from throughout the world who are developing a book, workshop and educational curriculum. In the United States, he is now working with Reuniting America to convene and facilitate “transpartisan” dialogues in which representatives from across the political spectrum can explore new and more productive ways of engaging in the political process.

His most recent book, published by Harvard Business School Press, is Leading Through Conflict: How Successful Leaders Transform Differences into Opportunities, which has recently been called one of the best business books of 2006 by Strategy & Business magazine. According to Stephen Covey, it is “an absolutely brilliant analysis” that shows how to "transform defensive energy into creative, collaborative energy that seeks a higher, third alternative for the good of the whole." It is currently being translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese and Chinese by regional publishing partners.