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Tim Cullen MBE

Associate Fellow


Saïd Business School
University of Oxford
Park End Street
Oxford
OX1 1HP

Profile

Tim Cullen is the founder of the Oxford Programme on Negotiation, on which he teaches.

An experienced practitioner and teacher on all aspects of negotiation, Tim has taught on various programmes at Saïd Business School and he is Professor of Management Practice at the Guanghua School of Management, Peking University, China.

Tim is Chairman of TCA Ltd, which teaches negotiation and governance/risk management programmes globally. He played a key strategic advisory role for the World Commission on Dams, the Commission on Growth and Development, and Business Partners for Development. He worked for 21 years for the World Bank, where his roles included Head of the Bank’s External Affairs in Europe and Chief Spokesman and Director of Information at the Washington Headquarters.

Tim has also served as Adviser to the IMF, the Asian Development Bank, the UN Secretariat and other UN organisations, the Mekong River Commission, the UK’s Department for International Development, and the Isle of Man Treasury.

He served as Commissioner on the Financial Supervision Commission of the Isle of Man and chaired the Risk and Internal Control Committee. Tim was the founder and first Executive Director for the Small Countries Financial Management Centre, a charitable body committed to capacity building in the financial sector of small states. For this work, he was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2014 Queen’s Birthday Honours.

Tim has an MA from Trinity College, University of Dublin.

Research and commentary

Tim has written extensively on issues of development, governance and negotiation, as well as on Yugoslavia and its successor countries.

He was a guest on the BBC Radio 4 programme, The Bottom Line, in 2016, on 'How to Negotiate' and again, in 2017, on 'Trade Negotiations and Brexit'. An article he wrote on the negotiation challenges of Brexit facing the British Government was published in Foreign Affairs in 2016 and further articles on Brexit have appeared in The Daily Telegraph and Prospect magazine.

In 2018, Tim wrote published articles on negotiating with North Korea, a country which he visited in 2008 to teach UN officials (including North Korean nationals) how to negotiate. He has been interviewed many times by international media and he is also a regular commentator on Shenzhen TV in China.

Oxford Answers

Thought-leadership and insights for business leaders written by our Faculty and Associate Fellows.

View articles by Tim.

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