Personality Poker: The Playing Card Tool for Driving High-Performance Teamworkand Innovation [Paperback]

Stephen M. Shapiro (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Do you delight in planning and taking action?
Do you revel in facts and data?
Do you crave new ideas and experiences?

Do you feel more complete when you are around others?

In other words, are you a spade, diamond, club, or heart?

Find out by taking one of the quickest, easiest, and most entertaining personality tests to ever hit the business market. Over 25,000 people in dozens of Fortune 500 companies have played Personality Poker to spur innovation and optimize growth.

Use the included cards and Steve Shapiro's insightful techniques to identify your personality "strong suit," revealing where you really belong in an organization and how to maximize your contribution. You will also discover:

--Why the person you like the least is the one you need the most
--How your greatest strength can limit your success
--Why homogenous teams are more efficient, but end up limiting innovation

A Closer Look at Personality Poker
(Click on Images to Enlarge)

From Publishers Weekly

An entertaining, if slightly wacky, personality-type game designed to improve performance in the workplace by Fortune 500 company adviser Shapiro, the game helps players identify and understand their "innovation styles": how they uniquely contribute to the success of a team and its chief goals. Each suit is assigned to a particular personality type, and the cards are shuffled and exchanged as the players learn about each other's strengths and weaknesses. The objective of the game, unfolding through four phases (define the challenge, generate solutions, plan and execute, engage hearts and minds) helps leaders put together a team withe each person's strengths used to their full advantage, in order to spur the team to optimized performance and more efficient work. A successful game ends with a team "playing with a full deck"--with all suits represented and allocated in the right way. Shapiro presents an extremely precise, process-driven method of personality analysis, simplified into game form; a clever idea, but more gimmick than guide.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover; 1 Har/Crds edition (October 28, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159184360X
• ISBN-13: 978-1591843603
• Product Dimensions: 4.2 x 1 x 10.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #113,317 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #53 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Psychology & Counseling > Occupational & Organizational

More About the Author

Stephen Shapiro is one of the foremost authorities on innovation culture, collaboration, and open innovation.
During the past twenty years, his message to hundreds of thousands of people in forty countries around the world has remained the same: Innovation only occurs when organizations bring together divergent points of view in an efficient manner.

Over the years, Stephen Shapiro has shared his innovative philosophy in books such as 24/7 Innovation and The Little Book of BIG Innovation Ideas. He has also trained more than 20,000 consultants in innovation during his 15 year tenure with Accenture. His latest creation Personality Poker, has been used by more than 25,000 people around the world to create high-performing innovation teams.

In addition to being an advisor, speaker, and author on innovation, he serves as the Chief Innovation Evangelist for InnoCentive, a pioneer in the burgeoning field of open innovation.

His work has been featured in Newsweek, Investor's Business Daily, Entrepreneur Magazine, O- The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times, and other prestigious publications. His clients include Staples, GE, BP, Johnson & Johnson, Fidelity Investments, Pearson Education, Nestlé, and Bristol-Myers Squibb.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars It's a book, it's a game, it's an innovation process... October 28, 2010

By Gregg Fraley

Format:Paperback

There's a new wave of poker madness about to start. I'm not talking Texas Hold-em.

This book is innovative in several ways. First, it's a truly novel way to assess yourself, teams, and companies. The built in assessment reveals your personality preferences, but perhaps more importantly, it's been designed to tell how your traits fit into the innovation process.

Second, it's not just a book, it's also a deck of cards, a card game, which comes packaged with the book. I've never seen this kind of packaging done before and it's a testament to Stephen's persuasion skills that he got Penguin to do it.

Next, it's a process, and a very powerful one, that can be used to usefully improve innovation teams and organizations.

Finally, it may be the most accessible personality assessment ever devised -- because it's a game, it's inherently fun. Because it's been well researched and tested, it's deeply meaningful.

There are many useful assessments out there, and some are routinely used as a part of an innovation program. The MBTI, MMPI, KAI, and the FourSight instrument are the ones I'm most familiar with, and there are others. What's different about Shapiro's new tool is that it's designed to work with the innovation process directly. Team building experts and innovation consultants have had to create their own exercises and methods to integrate the older assessments into their programs. If they use Shapiro's new assessment, they'll find that a lot of thinking has already been done for them. This "game" integrates well with innovation programs -- it plays well with others.

The real power of the book, and integrated game, is not simply reading it -- it's using it. Shapiro has made that remarkably easy to do. The nature of the game is interactive to begin with. In playing it with others in this instance you learn about yourself, you learn about your peers, and you learn ways to work together better. Shapiro lays out for readers how to use the game in a full fledged, full process innovation program. According to the book, this assessment has already been used by over 25,000 people -- that's excellent validation as to its precision and effectiveness.

Beyond the core content of the assessment/game, I have to say I love Shapiro's writing style. It's direct, it's entertaining, anecdotal, and full of the voice of real world experience. The story of how he invented the game itself is a classic innovation story. I'll only say it happened in Vegas! Clearly, he's been doing corporate innovation work for many years, and the book, the game, and now his readers all benefit. Many business books are easy to put down in spite of great content. This is different. It's compelling "how to" and it invites you to jump in and play.

I predict this book will sell widely, and will become a bit of a corporate standard for innovation team building. Buy it and try it with your team, I guarantee it will provide you a greater awareness of who you are -- and that's where innovation starts. Start dealing!

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Smart, fun and powerful October 28, 2010

By Peter Winick

Format:Paperback

First off I've never seen a business book that comes with it's own deck of cards so I have to admit I was curious. Personality Poker is a powerful tool that is fun to use and offers incredible insights into your own personality, the attributes of your team and your organization and gives tons of easy to implement tips. The tips not only help you better understand yourself but also focus on how to work with people that have very different attributes than you do and the importance of having a variety of styles on a team.

The writing is clear and concise and as you're reading this you uncover ways to increase your effectiveness and productivity as well as reduce the frustration you may have with working with certain personality types. If you'd like more insight into your own style, if you'd like to get your team to work better together and if you're tired of the profiling tests that have been out in the market for decades get this book, in fact I'd suggest you get a copy for everyone on your team.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome, simple, actionable, inspiring, effective! October 28, 2010

By David Newman

Format:Paperback

Like most of the great business books of the last two decades, Personality Poker has a simple premise: people are different. And to work effectively inside your organization, you need to connect with them in different ways based on YOUR strengths and preferences as well as their own.

Easily on par with the greats - The One Minute Manager, Fish!, Who Moved My Cheese, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - this book starts simple. You'll have many "IATK moments" ("I Already Knew That"). But then Shapiro delivers the zinger - how many of these A-ha insights (and the book is LOADED with them) are you ACTUALLY putting into PRACTICE?

For it is in the doing where the power lies.

The book is very positive, very encouraging, and best of all, very concrete and actionable. It's loaded with great ideas on how to connect more, lead smarter, and build relationships using the simple tools and concepts of personality poker.

As a consultant and speaker, I've seen many books bought in bulk and distributed by the thousands inside a corporate environment. I've seen CEO's force the "motivational Kool-Aid" down their employees' throats. It's not pretty.

Personality Poker, on the other hand, is a book that EVERY CEO, EVERY executive, EVERY manager, EVERY corporate insider, EVERY entrepreneur, and EVERY man and woman can learn incredible lessons from. This is a book worthy of the largest possible audience, both inside and outside corporate America. If you're going to buy a book company-wide, this is definitely the "Kool Aid" you want circulating in your hallways and absorbed into your culture. It's actionable, it's valuable, and your people will WANT to put its ideas to use immediately.

Yes, it IS that good.

Don't just read this book. Highlight it, dog-ear it, share its wisdom with others. And most of all, ACT on it. With Personality Poker, EVERYONE wins.

-- David Newman, author of Do It! Marketing: 77 Instant-Action Ideas to Boost Sales, Maximize Profits, and Crush Your Competition
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