Mori Taheripour teaches negotiations at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has taught undergraduates, MBA students and executive MBA students how to have better business conversations. Taheripour has also coached corporate clients, including on behalf of Goldman Sachs and Major League Baseball, about how to feel more confident and comfortable in negotiating, a skill that everyone uses daily but which tends to be seen as a kind of dark art.
Amid the backdrop of one of the highest-profile negotiations in recent memory, centered on Elon Musk’s ongoing stop-and-go plans to buy Twitter, and aware that many readers are negotiating on their own behalf right now — for more time, more funding, a better exit package, fewer investor protections — we talked with Taheripour earlier this week to ask where negotiations tend to falter and how to help them succeed. Excerpts from that chat follow edited for
