Laura Huang

When the future is uncertain, the answer isn’t always more data. Leaders also need to know which signals matter, where to focus, and when experience is telling them something the numbers can’t.

Distinguished Northeastern professor and bestselling author Laura Huang has spent years studying how people make decisions in conditions of complexity and risk. Drawing on her research on intuition, entrepreneurship, and competitive advantage, she shows leaders how to combine hard data with informed gut feel—and how to turn constraints, unexpected developments, and even perceived disadvantages into strategic opportunities.

In this practical session, Laura helps leaders sharpen the judgment behind their biggest strategic choices. Participants will learn how to distinguish meaningful signals from noise, identify inflection points before they occur, decide which opportunities deserve attention and resources, recognize when an existing course of action is no longer serving them, and make smarter bets without waiting for perfect certainty. For anyone balancing innovation, governance, and long-term resilience, Laura offers a framework for acting decisively while remaining adaptable. Audiences leave with a new approach to strategy in uncertain times that they can apply today.

How do you find a competitive edge when the obstacles feel stacked against you? When people have written you off before even giving you a chance? Award-winning Harvard Business School professor Laura Huang shows us that success can be attained by cultivating our unique “edge”—that elusive quality that gives us an upper hand and attracts attention and support.

Success is rarely just about the quality of our ideas, credentials, and skills, or even the hard work we put into it, says Laura. Instead, it’s about how well we can shape our strengths, flaws, and others’ perceptions of us—turning them into assets that can’t be ignored. No matter your specific set of challenges, or the predisposed biases standing in your way, in this groundbreaking talk Huang will show you how to transform set-backs into your own unique edge—and help you keep it sharp.

It’s one of the most polarizing pieces of advice that we hear: “Go with your gut.” Many of us disregard our intuition in favor of gathering more and more data. But in an age where AI is rapidly taking over decision-making, Laura Huang argues that our intuition is the most important thing setting high performers apart. And more importantly, she teaches us how to hone it.

In this talk, Laura discusses her research on decision-making in organizations, and how you can combine both data and gut feel to make better decisions. Drawing on her fascinating book, You Already Know, she reveals how individuals and organizations alike can make better decisions by combining our unique experience with the data we already have.

Laura scientifically breaks down what happens during the intuiting process and details the personified, physical, emotional, and cognitive components of the gut feel that results. She shares real-life examples of ways you can leverage your intuition—like meeting someone three different times and in three different contexts before you hire them (and how you can do that in only 45 minutes). And she provides valuable exercises to help you recognize, understand, and strengthen your intuition:

• taking it from passive and accidental to active and intentional;
• developing it to deliver increasingly reliable signals;
• heightening our own sensitivity to the signals it sends;
• and much more.

This talk is a must-listen for leaders, managers, individual contributors, and everyone looking to use what they already know to make better decisions in the day-to-day.

Despite the transformative nature of artificial intelligence and data analytics, what underlies these technologies and tools are human capabilities, innovative uncertainty, and complex information sources. If we can include our own authentic human intelligence in the conversation around AI, we’ll gain a more positive, balanced, and sophisticated AI strategy.

Drawing from her award-winning research on perceptions, signals, and human behavior, Laura Huang integrates her human-centric perspective to show how the artificially-intelligent (AI) perspective is only as good as our ability to recognize the authentic and a behaviorally-intelligent perspective.

Women entrepreneurs and leaders are taught from a young age that hard work is the key to success—don’t give up, keep at it, stay motivated, tenacious, determined and that’s how you’ll succeed. However that’s not what female leaders actually experience. Laura Huang’s research—inspired by  her tenure in investment banking—shows that success in the venture capital world often came down to investors’ gut feelings, and therefore, unfortunately, their preconceived conceptions and stereotypes.

But what if women entrepreneurs could flip those stereotypes in their favor and create an advantage or edge? In this enlightening, empowering talk Harvard Business Professor Laura Huang explains how women, and particularly women of color, can guide and redirect those very stereotypes which hold them back, and sharpen them into a unique and sustainable edge.