The idea
When a decision hurts, that pain is either a warning to stop or a toll worth paying. The two feel identical. The test settles it with evidence instead of feeling.
The Keynote · Ten minutes to a half day · Virtual or in-person
Hard or Wrong
A keynote on discernment. Your team learns to tell a decision that is hard from one that is wrong, then runs a real one, live, before they leave the room.
Booked for AI adoption, for teams in the middle of a reorganization or a shaken industry, and for the growth call a leadership team keeps circling.
Keynote speaker, Adobe Creator VIP Community Summit · Former Meta and Adobe · General Assembly faculty for over ten years · NYU faculty
Trusted by teams at
Who it is for
Executives, people leaders and teams facing a call they keep circling: an AI rollout, a reorganization, a growth decision.
Formats
Ten minutes, 45 to 60 minutes, or a half-day working session. Virtual or in-person. Customized to your room on a pre-event call.
They leave with
Three questions, the Hard or Wrong card, and one real decision already made during the session.
Who books this
Three rooms it was built for.
Every leader in your audience is carrying a decision they have been avoiding. Which decision depends on what your organization is going through. The test is the same. The room is not.
01 · AI adoption
The tools are in. The habits are not.
Most people on the team do not see themselves as someone who uses AI, so they keep grinding the manual version and call it thoroughness. The room runs the test on its own process: which part is hard and worth keeping, and which part is wrong and has to go.
Google, Amazon, EY and Berkshire Hathaway have brought him in on AI adoption. He has felt the hesitation your team feels, because he has it too, alone, before he commits. Everything your team builds is built from scratch, in the room, on your own use cases.
Best for AI rollouts · L&D programs · sales kickoffs
02 · A reorg, a merger, an industry in turmoil
Your team is resisting the change. They might be right.
When a team pushes back, leaders usually treat it as a motivation problem and add pressure. Often the team is right and the change is wrong, and nobody has a way to tell the two apart. The test gives the whole room one way to settle it, out loud, with evidence.
Terry was fired from Facebook in 2015 and rebuilt from there. The room gets that story, then a way to name which initiatives to drop now and which to push with everyone behind them.
Best for post-merger town halls · annual meetings · association conferences
03 · The opportunity
The offer is on the table. Nobody will call it.
A new product line, an expansion, a partnership, the hire that changes the org chart. Capable leaders circle a growth call for two years and call the delay diligence. The test names the goal, settles hard or wrong with evidence, and produces the move before the quarter ends.
In 2019 Terry turned down $80,000 in contracts because the work had gone hollow. It felt reckless. Six months later everything shut down and the pivot was already done.
Best for leadership offsites · executive retreats · planning sessions
What changes after he leaves
Most rooms feel something for an hour. Then Tuesday arrives.
The talk lands. People nod, a few come up afterwards, everyone goes back to their desk. By Tuesday somebody is alone with a real decision in front of them, unsure, and the person who spoke is gone. Whether anything changed gets decided right there, not in the room.
Terry builds for that moment because he is in it too. He works remotely, so he is the one at home with nobody to ask, carrying a number he has to hit. Every system he teaches is one he has had to use himself, alone, with something real riding on it.
So the session ends with a decision already made rather than a feeling. People have to feel safe acting before they will act. Get them there and the behavior holds. Skip it and the room goes home enthusiastic and unchanged.
The Keynote
Hard or Wrong: how to tell what deserves your persistence.
When a decision hurts, that pain is either a warning or a toll, and both feel identical. Most people settle it by feeling, which is why capable people grind on dead things and quit good ones.
Terry teaches tactical discernment: name the goal, settle hard or wrong with evidence rather than feeling, then name the move. Halfway through, every phone comes out. Attendees run a real decision through the test on the spot, and the room runs one stuck initiative together until the move is obvious.
Hard is not the enemy. Wrong is.
Your audience leaves with
- The three questions and the three evidence states, ready for Monday's 1:1s.
- One real decision already run through the test during the session.
- The Hard or Wrong card, plus a manager version for performance conversations.
- A shared name for the two ways people cheat: flinching and grinding.
- A 30-day follow-up worksheet.
The Test
Three questions. Three evidence states. Four outcomes.
- Question 1What am I actually trying to achieve here? Half the time, naming the goal ends the decision on the spot.
- Question 2Is this hard, or is it wrong? Settled by evidence. Avoidance means go get the fact. Experiment means run the smallest reversible step. Values means set a decide-by date and ask who you want to be.
- Question 3What's the move? Wrong goal: drop it now, not in six months. Wrong approach: keep the goal, change the road. Just hard and not yours: hand it off. Just hard and yours: push, with the whole team behind it.
Then the honesty check. There are two ways to cheat the test. Flinching: calling it wrong the second it gets hard. Grinding: calling it hard long after the evidence said stop. Your team learns to name both, in themselves and in each other.
Adobe Creator VIP Community Summit · San Francisco
Watch the talk, start to finish.
Fourteen years after he left Adobe, Terry came back to keynote its Creator VIP Community Summit. Ten minutes, one test, and homework the room had to do that night. This is the full program recording.
From the room
"Terry was wise, honest, vulnerable, funny and so captivating. I'm inspired to be better and challenge myself to step out of my comfort zones."
Nicole Breanne Shabada · Photographer · Community Spotlight speaker, Adobe Creator VIP Community Summit
"I could listen to Terry talking for 6 hours straight."
Fawzi Ammache · Future with Fawzi · Adobe Creator VIP Community Summit
Format 01
Ten minutes
The talk Adobe booked. One story, the test, the homework. Built for summits, all-hands meetings and the slot between two panels.
Format 02
The keynote, 45 to 60
No slides, no clicker. The stories and the test, then every phone comes out and the room runs a real decision together until the move is obvious.
Format 03
The working session
Half a day. The keynote, then your leadership team runs one stuck initiative through the test to a decision, with Terry in the room.
Measured results
Every corporate program gets scored. Here is what came back.
Anonymous participant surveys, run and scored by the organization that booked him, benchmarked against its own standards. None of these numbers came from Terry.
L'Oréal
81
Net Promoter Score
62% above the benchmark General Assembly sets for its own programs.
ASCAP
97%
Taking it back to work
36 of 37 said they were likely to put at least one tool or skill from the session into their regular workload.
ASCAP · Estée Lauder Companies
4.7/5
Instructor score
The same number from two clients: 4.70 across 37 responses, 4.69 across 17.
L'Oréal
9/10
Impact
9/10 would recommend the program to a colleague.
They act on it
36 of 37 left saying they would use something specific from the session at work. A harder measure than satisfaction.
It travels
Beauty marketers and music-rights executives scored the instruction a hundredth of a point apart, in rooms with nothing in common.
They come back
A second session for the wider organization was booked off the back of these. No survey can fake a rebooking.
"You expertly weave in both industry insights and your own tips and tricks alongside your lecture."
General Assembly classroom observation · Google Apprenticeship Program, June 2025 · Rated Expert on instructional presence and career focus
Source: anonymous end-of-program participant surveys, 2026. ASCAP AI Fundamentals, 4 and 6 August, 37 responses. L'Oréal, New York, 10 responses. Estée Lauder Companies, Marketing Modularized, 17 responses across Estée Lauder, MAC Cosmetics and Clinique. Surveys run, scored and benchmarked by General Assembly.
What organizers say
From the people who booked him.
"Your message, 'Is it hard, or is it wrong?' really resonated with our students. It was wonderful to see their engagement and interaction both during class and the long lines of individual student questions after."
Caitlin C. Rush · Senior Associate Director, Career Resource Center, University at Buffalo School of Management
"I had no idea he was improvising. He'd absorbed what they were dealing with and wove it into the talk on the spot. People built actual tools on their phones. Not demos. Working tools they walked out with and used the next morning. Months later, people from that session are still talking about it. That does not happen after a keynote."
Amy Nelson · Founder, The Riveter
"Terry Rice delivered a powerful presentation. He's an engaging presenter who speaks with the crowd, not at them."
Michael Gewirtzman · Global VP of Programming, Advertising Week
"I do my best not to be biased, but that was one of the best sessions we have had this year."
Anna Stinehour · Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center
Berkshire Hathaway
Straight from the conference floor.
Attendees on camera, minutes after the session ended.
"When you come to a conference like this, you're always looking for that one class that's going to take you back to the office and get you fired up about your job again. Terry was the one that did it."
Karen Lane · Berkshire Hathaway
"I think Terry did an amazing job. It was actually one of the courses that I found to be the most practical that I can take to my team when I get back home. So I really appreciate how thorough he was, but also how simple he made it."
Attendee · Berkshire Hathaway
From The Room
What people say after.
"He really reminded us of the value of honesty, and not just authenticity, but actually being candid about even the hardest moments in your life and how that can bring connection."
Kim Rittberg · Telly Award Winner
"It was real. He does such a great job of tying in his personal stories and telling you how the worst day in his life has led to the best days in his business."
Colin Rocker · Forbes 30 Under 30
Worst days lead to best daysColin Rocker · Forbes 30 Under 30
Your pain is your differentiationIndia Witkin
Honesty builds connection and businessKim Rittberg · Telly Award Winner
Authenticity over algorithmTaylor M LaSane
Share the uncomfortable partsMarlon Mills
Build resilience, don't just overcomeRemi Leibovic
Setbacks are bumps, not roadblocksMichael Nicastro
You don't need success to offer valueMalika
The permission you didn't know you neededKatie Keate Johnson
About Terry
Former Meta and Adobe. Fourteen years later, Adobe booked him back.
Terry Rice teaches leaders how to tell the difference between a decision that is hard and one that is wrong. As a business development leader at Meta and Adobe, he watched capable people grind for years on work that was never going to pay off, and walk away from good work the moment it got uncomfortable. Rebuilding his own career from complete crisis produced the test he now teaches to Fortune 500 teams and scaling entrepreneurs.
He has designed AI programs for Google, Amazon, EY and Berkshire Hathaway, and he returned to Adobe, fourteen years after leaving, to keynote its Creator VIP Community Summit. The reps came first: at General Assembly he led three or four workshops a week, some of them mandatory 9 a.m. sessions for executives who did not want to be there. Ten years on, people still tell him they remember a room he ran there or at NYU.
FacultyGeneral Assembly faculty, over ten years. NYU faculty.
Featured onGood Morning America, SXSW, the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Forbes, Black Enterprise.
MentorAmazon, Techstars, NYU Entrepreneurial Institute.
HomeBrooklyn. Father of five.
For event planners
What you need to know.
- Pre-event call. Terry gets on a call with your team to understand your audience, goals and context.
- Audience diagnostic. He talks to attendees beforehand and weaves their real situations into the keynote.
- Interactive setup. A QR code and URL your team drops into the slides. No app, no account, no IT approval.
- Post-event resource. Every attendee leaves with the card and the 30-day follow-up worksheet.
- No surprises. Content agreed in advance, responsive from first call to final follow-up.
How long is the talk?
Ten minutes, 45 to 60 minutes, or a half-day working session. The ten-minute version is the one Adobe booked; the keynote adds the live decision the whole room runs together.
Does he speak on AI adoption?
Yes. Google, Amazon, EY and Berkshire Hathaway have brought him in on AI adoption. He works remotely, so he knows the part most sessions miss: the moment somebody is alone at their desk, unsure, with nobody to ask. The keynote covers the decision side of adoption. The half-day working session is where your team builds its own workflows on its own use cases.
Can he customize it for our industry?
That is the default, not an add-on. A pre-event call, conversations with attendees, and their real situations woven into the keynote. No two rooms get the same talk.
Does the interactive part need IT approval?
No. Attendees scan a QR code and open a web page. No app, no accounts, no data collected beyond the session.
What does it cost?
Fees depend on format, timing and location. Book a thirty-minute call and you will have a custom proposal within 48 hours.
Check availability
Bring Hard or Wrong to your event.
Terry takes a limited number of keynote dates each quarter, and high-demand periods book 6 to 12 months out.
One call, thirty minutes. If it is not a fit, you will know before the call ends.
Prefer email? terry@terryrice.co
Terry works with Leading Authorities Speakers Bureau on select keynote bookings. Contact Leila Brahimi at leila@lauthorities.com, or reach out to Terry directly. Either path works.