The Personality Poker Audiobook Introduction

Hi, this is Steve Shapiro and welcome to our first real episode of the Personality Poker Podcast. And we're going to do something a little unusual here. Instead of this being an interview or me talking, I'm going to share with you and we're going to do that on a regular basis throughout this podcast. I'm going to share with you the audiobook for Personality Poker. Now, the Personality Poker Game has been out for 20 years. 2005 is when we first developed it. And in 2010, Penguin Portfolio Penguin bought the rights to the Personality Poker book and they published this really cool book with the cards attached to the book. And after a while it was decided that the book's design, although creative, didn't really work. The decks of cards were falling off of the book, the book was too tall and so it wouldn't fit in bookcases. And so eventually it was decided that we would stop publishing the Personality Poker book and I got the rights back to that. But we never created an audiobook. So I do sell the ebook as part of my certification program. You get that when you go through a certification program. But the audiobook, I thought this would be fun to just share with people. Now, I didn't want to go into a studio and spend a ton of money and a lot of time trying to read a multi hour book. So I decided to use my voice clone. I used 11 labs and I uploaded the entire audiobook from my pivotal audiobook which was done in a recording studio. And I trained AI to sound pretty much like me. It's not perfect. You'll notice that it's maybe not quite this friendly and as fast paced, but it works. And especially if you increase the speed a little bit, maybe to 1.25 or 1.5, you barely will notice the difference. So welcome to the first episode where I'm going to share with you the introduction to the Personality Poker book. Again, this was published back in 2010. Use the same manuscript with some extremely minor changes. And this is AI after this point. I hope you enjoy it.

Introduction what's in the cards for you? Personality Poker is a fun game that will help you identify and understand what I call your innovation. Personality, the way in which you uniquely contribute to the success of a team and its chief goals. Your style indicates, your preferences, your likes and dislikes. These often translate into behaviors. For example, do you like making decisions based on facts and data, or do you prefer to operate on feelings and intuition? Do you like environments that are orderly and structured? Or do you prefer unpredictable, even chaotic environments built on change. Knowing your style helps you understand how you prefer to relate with other people. Do you like large groups, small groups, or working independently? Your style can also help you understand how you develop new ideas. Do you derive ideas from deep expertise or do you connect the dots in order to develop new ideas from a wide range of experiences? Playing Personality Poker will help you answer all of these questions about yourself and so much more. It's the easiest, fastest, and most entertaining way to find out what makes you tick and how you can capitalize on your strengths and weaknesses in work and in life. The first inspiration for personality Poker came to me in 1999, when I was a business consultant to a Formula One team. Formula One race cars are some of the fastest machines on earth. Truly technological marvels, these cars cost millions of dollars to produce. The car can go from 0 to 100 mph and back to 0 in about four seconds, and from 100 miles an hour to a full stop in less than two seconds. With a long enough ramp leading into New York's Lincoln Tunnel, an F1 car could ride upside down on the ceiling. But the truly amazing part of Formula One racing is the pit crew, the people on the sidelines who service the car during the race. The rules have since changed, but at the time I was consulting, a Formula One pit crew of 20 mechanics refueled the car, changed the tires, performed required maintenance, and made aerodynamic adjustments, all in a matter of seconds. The lollipop man held a sign telling the driver what to do. Four tire changers removed and reinstalled the single lug nut on each tire. Eight tire carriers, two for each tire, removed the old tire and replaced it with the new one. The person responsible for fueling the car, which they no longer do, was supported by a couple of assistants, while others at the front and the rear used jacks to lift the car. Someone stood by with a fire extinguisher in the unlikely case the fuel ignited and finally the starter stood ready should the driver stall his engine during the Pit Stop. 20 mechanics, each with a specific assigned task to get a pit crew working as efficiently as possible. Members continually shift positions during practice until they find the perfect combination for the optimal configuration of the team. The goal is to place the right person in the right position. The difference between removing the lug nut on the right front wheel versus the left rear wheel might seem insignificant to the layperson, but in F1, these tiny differences spell victory or defeat. They find that each mechanic has a particular strength, and the key is to leverage that strength. Once optimized Teams can reliably perform at high levels. Equally important to getting pit crew members in the right role is to ensure that every role is addressed. If just one position from the pit crew is eliminated, the team will not perform well. Equally, each person knows exactly how they contribute to the team. The mechanic changing the tires does not try to fuel the car, but if something goes wrong, they all know how to handle the other positions. Watching the pit crew at work, I began to wonder if there was a lesson to be learned from these highly efficient teams. Could the same level of optimized performance be attained with innovation teams? Having studied successful organizations for the past 25 years, I learned that although innovation is critical to long term growth, most organizations are unable to deliver innovation in a repeatable and predictable manner. With the pit crew as my guide, I was on a mission. I looked for ways to get innovators in the right roles, to make sure all of the innovation roles are covered and to develop a divide and conquer innovation approach. Like pit crew members, employees within organizations have specific strengths. We all contribute more to certain parts of the innovation process than to others. Some excel at data driven work yet struggle with people related issues. Others are brilliant at generating breakthrough ideas but never get any real work done. Some are great motivators but rebel against planning. Several perform best on their own while while others are natural leaders. Each of these strengths represents a different innovation style and each style links back to a specific step in the innovation process. To create an innovation team as optimized as a pit crew, you need to get individuals in the right role based on each person's innovation personality. And you need to make sure you have all of the styles represented on your team. Sometimes creativity is confused with innovation. They are not the same thing, although there are different definitions out there. From my perspective, creativity is about generating new ideas. But this represents only one style and one step in the innovation process. Innovation is much more. It is a fundamental cultural shift that results in the implementation of valuable ideas. Innovation involves ensuring that ideas solve strategic needs and and requires planning, budgeting, resource allocation and action. Ultimately, success relies on engaging the hearts and minds of employees and customers to execute the best ideas. The Innovation Process and the Evolution of Personality Poker Innovation is a simple process that involves four phases. The first two phases address what is referred to as the front end of innovation. Some call it the fuzzy front end because it can be unpredictable and fraught with uncertainty. However, when it is done properly, you can even make this part of the process predictable and likely to succeed. The front end of innovation focuses on identifying challenges and generating solutions. This is where the most creative work takes place. The last two phases are referred to as implementation. This is the point where an idea moves from concept to reality and ultimately makes money for the company. In the innovation world, less focus is put on these steps and the associated skills because most organizations have significant project implementation experience. However, the requirements for implementation are different in the innovation world. Given the fact that you are often venturing into unchartered territories, the implementation process for innovation needs to be more flexible and iterative than it is for traditional projects. The four phases of the innovation process 1 define the challenge make sure the right problem is being solved. Two Generate solutions Develop creative solutions third Plan and execute Set up the structure and accountabilities for successful implementation. 4. Engage the hearts and minds get employees and customers on board and use each person to the best of his or her ability. These four steps correspond to the four primary innovation personality styles that are the core of this book. The first version of Personality Poker I created was based on my personal experience and was a simple spreadsheet with 10 rows. In each row were four words that test takers would rate from most like them to least like them. The words were adjectives such as creative, empathetic, analytical and driven. This early version eventually evolved into a more complex PowerPoint presentation that I used during speeches, but I longed for something more interactive. The game as it is played today didn't take off until I had an aha moment in Las Vegas back in 2003 while playing blackjack at the Venetian Hotel. I realized I could map the four steps of the innovation process and the four personality styles to the four suits in a deck of poker cards. I quickly began experimenting with a card based version of my spreadsheet. I took the 52 poker cards and wrote words across the faces with a marker. The words were the same ones used in my spreadsheet plus a dozen extra. I mapped the four suits as Define the challenge. Those who prefer facts and principles. I chose spades for these analytical individuals because they like to dig for data. Warren Buffett might be a good example of someone who relies heavily on facts to make decisions. Generate solutions. Those who prefer ideas and experiences. I chose diamonds for these multifaceted individuals. Entrepreneur and creator of the Virgin brand Sir Richard Branson is representative of the dynamic and imaginative diamonds who develop game changing ideas, plan and execute. Those who prefer plans and actions. I chose clubs for them because they like movement like the swing of a golf club. Jack Welch, former GE CEO, might be a good illustration of the action oriented Clubs who get things done engage the hearts and minds. Those who prefer people and relationships. I chose hearts for them for obvious reasons. Oprah Winfrey is often seen as a caring heart who has changed the lives of millions of people. After various trial versions, I found that I could expand the idea and increase the value of the game by also taking advantage of the colors and the numbers. This ultimately led to the version we use during speeches and sell to individuals who are certified what is Personality Poker? To put it simply, Personality Poker is a game that helps you identify and understand your innovation style and more importantly, the innovation styles of others. By pinpointing how everyone contributes to and and detracts from innovation in your particular setting, you can create a more powerful organization. Playing Personality Poker can help you hire the right people, put them in the right roles, and manage your team dynamic more effectively. You'll be taking advantage of the same techniques used by race car pit crews to achieve extraordinary levels of efficiency. Personality Poker can help you understand why some employees become frustrated when your organization's culture conflicts with their innovation styles. With it, you can diagnose the reason your company is struggling to grow and it can help you, as an individual be happier and more successful by aligning your style to your role. When we understand our personality style, we can perform at higher levels and better enjoy what we are doing. Even though this game is designed to optimize your work environment, you will find that insights from the process will transfer to other areas of your life as well as you'll become more efficient, patient and effective in every role you perform, both on and off the job. No matter what type of work you do, I am confident it will help you. Personality Poker has been played by over 100,000 entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, CEOs, team leaders, managers, employees and team members. It has helped individuals in all of these roles be more productive, more engaged, more innovative and more successful. I have played Personality Poker with people from nearly every industry and every function. I have played it with entire companies and individual departments and in this case, size doesn't matter. I have seen Personality Poker played with groups ranging from 8 people to over 800 people. We even analyzed the personality styles of nearly 1000 people during a session at Disney World. Regardless of the group size, after 45 to 60 minutes, everyone understands how they contribute to innovation, how to build a high performing team, and what unique role they would play on that team. Even if you have taken personality profiles in the past, you haven't experienced the energy associated with a large personality poker game. By the end, you may Be shocked at how accurate it is in such a short period of time. This high energy group participation process is just one of the many differences between Personality Poker and more traditional personality assessment tools. We dig a bit deeper into these differences in the next section and in chapter one. What will you learn? Clients tell me that they gained deeper insights into themselves, their co workers and their organizations in just 15 minutes of playing personality Poker than they had in completing other personality assessments. This is partly due to the fact that it's a team oriented event, so everyone learns at the same time and from each other. Remember that first and foremost you will learn about your innovation style. That is the way in which you can best contribute to innovation and how you sometimes detract from innovation. By understanding your style, you can determine which steps of the innovation process could are the ones where you can provide the greatest input. You will also become skilled at how and when you need to shift your behaviors in other steps to avoid derailing the innovation process. We call this playing to your strong suit or using your preferred style in a way that maximizes your contribution. As part of this process, you will also discover how others see you and how those views may differ significantly from the way you see yourself. A disconnect between how you see yourself and how others see you can have a significant impact on team dynamics and interpersonal relationships. You will discover why the person you like the least may be the person you need the most. That's to say, the person who has the style opposite of yours may be the most annoying to you while also being the most critical to your success. You'll also see how you probably hire based on chemistry, selecting people who are just like you and how this might be the reason your organization is not as innovative as it could be. By nurturing diverse thinking, you can build in creative tension that allows for new ideas to emerge. We call this playing with a full deck. Creating an organization that embraces all of the different styles and puts people in roles that maximize their contribution, their strong suit. You'll also learn about how to divide the workup by so that you get maximum throughput dealing out the work while bringing the styles back together at critical points in the process. Shuffling the deck as part of the process of personality poker, you'll learn how others think, what motivates them and how they make decisions. This information can be useful in many ways. It can help you communicate more effectively with others. It can explain why tensions exist between you and other people and why embracing these differences instead of avoiding them can benefit you. It can even help you sell your ideas to others more effectively by understanding how they make decisions. Selling your ideas is fundamental to moving innovation forward. You will also learn why certain leadership styles are more likely to fail and what you can do about it. Some people are better leaders, others are better managers, and some are best at more focused or solitary work. There are those who are best for the startup phase of work, while others excel at helping organizations scale. Armed with this information, you can best determine who should help drive your organization's growth engine. It is common knowledge that success is a team effort, but less understood is how to go about optimizing the engine of that team effort. Although you need the right people filling the right roles in order to achieve a certain balance of styles, and you don't necessarily need every style on every team. In fact, you don't need every style on your payroll. Sometimes it makes sense to engage the services of consultants, contractors, outsourcers, universities or alliance partners with the appropriate skills and styles. I will show you how to determine this in your own situation. But if you don't have every style integrated into your innovation process in some way, you will have difficulties growing your business because you solve the wrong problems because you aren't fact driven, arrive at uncreative solutions, neglect the implementation of your ideas Missing clubs or fail to engage the support of your organization Missing Hearts it is worth pointing out that although diamonds are often thought of as the creative types, everyone is creative in their own way. For instance, a club might put together a practical inventory system adapted to the unique needs of the business, A spade might create a mathematical formula that optimizes investment returns, or a heart might suggest a new and useful way to resolve team conflicts. Clearly, all of these are forms of creativity. Being successful in your career or business requires more than simply finding your strengths. It's about finding how your strengths work best with your team and others. When you do this, you will discover that you enjoy your work more and that your organization thrives even in difficult times how to Use this Book Personality Poker is simple and so is the structure of this book. There are only four main sections along with a bonus section and some appendices. Regardless of whether you're playing personality Poker alone or with a team, you'll want to start with Part one which offers some pre game warm up advice and a foundation from which you can make the most out of the experience. In part two you will find various versions of the game ranging from Solitaire to be played by yourself or with one other person, to poker with larger groups. If you're playing with friends and family. You may want to try some of the alternative rules outlined later in chapter 12, designed for people who know each other well and are willing to have some real fun. The purpose of Part two is to take you through the rules of playing the game so that you can assemble your own perfect hand. Once you have the cards that best describe your personality style, Chapter four helps you find what we refer to as your strong suit. The term originated in card games like Bridge and hearts that require following suit. The strong suit in a player's hand is the one represented by the most and highest value cards. If a hand has many spades of high value, for example, spades would be its strong suit. By extension, this term has been used to describe an individual's area of expertise. For example, creativity is my strong suit. Interestingly, the term is used more often in a negative context. Math is not his strong suit. We use the term strong suit to describe your innate personality, strengths and preferences. These are not necessarily learned skills as such. Rather, they are preferences that you have for the way you like to and best operate. In Chapter four, in addition to learning about your strong suit, you will get an overview of the significance of the colors red or black and the numbers. These represent your thinking and energy styles, respectively. Your thinking style indicates how you develop new ideas. Do you work from deep expertise or do you connect the dots from a wide range of experiences? Your energy style indicates how you relate to others. Do you like working alone or in small groups or do you prefer working with larger teams? Energy style relates closely to introversion and extroversion. Once you know your styles, you will want to interpret the results. In Part three, Playing to youo Strong Suit, you will find all the details for each of the four primary innovation styles to help you explore the meaning of the suits and the numbers in much more detail. You will also learn why some people are more difficult to type than others and how you can get better at spotting each style. In doing so, you will gather a bounty of insider knowledge not only about yourself, but also about the others around you, including their underlying motivations, communication styles, approach to decision making, and much more. Although you may be tempted to start here, I strongly urge you to play either solitaire or poker before jumping to this chapter. Part of the value of playing personality poker for the first time lies in not knowing the underlying meaning of each card in the deck. Starting with this section might influence your choice of cards in such a way that the game is no longer as accurate at revealing your true preferred style. Part 4 Playing with a Full deck may be the most important section. This is where the rubber meets the road. In this chapter, you will learn more about the application of these styles in the innovation process and how you can optimize your teams for maximum results. Put simply, this part will help you create balanced and aligned teams. Part five is called Upping the Ante. Although the material in this section will be of great value to anyone, each chapter is designed to appeal to the specific interests of each innovation style. It includes the science of the unconscious mind, techniques for enhancing your creativity, and rules for playing with friends and family members. It also provides some simple approaches for making personality poker a reality within your organization for clubs. Finally, the appendices provide a brief history of poker cards, how to take advantage of open innovation, and much more. Ready to Play? Let's get started.