What if understanding who you’re NOT is actually more important than understanding who you are?
In this episode, I sit down with innovation expert, Hall of Fame speaker, and author Stephen Shapiro for a wide-ranging conversation about innovation, goals, productivity, personality, collaboration, and creating cultures where different types of people can do their best work.
Stephen and I go back more than 20 years — although he probably didn’t know it at the time! — and I’ve followed and learned from his work throughout my speaking career. So I took advantage of this conversation to revisit some of his ideas that have stuck with me over the years.
We talk about his counterintuitive philosophy of “Goal-Free Living,” why being called “the laziest person” became a compliment that shaped the way he thinks about work, and why he believes most of the best practices we learn from successful people should probably be ignored.
Then we dive into Stephen’s Personality Poker methodology and his new book, You’re Not Playing with a Full Deck. Stephen explains how understanding your natural strengths — and, more importantly, what’s missing from your “hand” — can help you figure out who you need around you.
I even let Stephen analyze my own Personality Poker results, which leads us into a fascinating conversation about the difference between our innate traits and the traits we learn in order to become successful — and whether some of those learned behaviors can eventually start holding us back.
Finally, we explore how these ideas apply beyond the individual to teams and entire organizations, including how leaders can identify what’s missing from their teams, improve collaboration, and create lasting culture change.
Key Takeaways
Why Stephen prefers using a “compass” instead of a “map” when thinking about goals and the future
How to “meander with purpose” while still moving your life and business forward
Why being “lazy” can actually force you to rethink systems and focus on the work that creates the most value
Why you should be skeptical of other people’s “best practices” — even when their advice is good
How Personality Poker helps you understand both who you are and who you are NOT
Why the missing “cards” in your hand can reveal the people you most need to collaborate with
The difference between innate personality traits and traits you’ve learned in order to succeed
Why playing to learned strengths might sometimes pull you away from what naturally energizes you
How teams can diagnose gaps that are hurting creativity, execution, decision-making, and collaboration
Why the person who annoys you the most may actually be the person you need the most
How organizations can move beyond one-time training and create culture change that actually sticks
Relevant Links
Stephen Shapiro: theinnovationspeaker.com
Personality Poker: personalitypoker.com
You’re Not Playing with a Full Deck book by Stephen Shapiro
Avish’s website: AvishParashar.com
Unedited Transcript
Avish Parashar
Hello, Stephen, and welcome to the podcast. How are you, sir?
Stephen Shapiro
Doing really well. Excited to see where we land with all this.
Avish Parashar
I am. I'm excited as well. And I was already excited to have you on, and just all these little brief chats we have keep pinging ideas in my head, like, "Oh, I didn't know that," or, "Here's something else fun to talk about."
Avish Parashar
So we're going to get into a lot of different things about you, your work, and your background. Before we do that, for people who are not familiar with you and your work, could you give us the one-minute background slash bio of who you are and what you do?
Stephen Shapiro
Sure. So I've spent pretty much most of my business career focused on innovation and growth. I founded and led a 20,000-person innovation practice at the consulting firm Accenture.
Stephen Shapiro
When my first book launched in 2001, my book launch party was my leaving Accenture party, and that was basically the day I launched my own speaking business. And that's pretty much what I've been doing, is helping organizations innovate and collaborate and deal with cultural challenges through a number of different methodologies I've developed over the years.
Avish Parashar
And the most recent methodology, the one the new book is about, is Personality Poker, which we're going to get into. But since we're starting with bio, I want to go back. And we had just been on something last week, so you and I talked about this. But I think it's interesting for the audience is, I remember you from when I first started my speaking business, and I'm doing a networking thing and attending events.
Avish Parashar
And there was this small company of a friend's event at this place called the Atlanta Bread Company, right outside of Philadelphia. And it was like you and 20 people, and you're talking about your book. And I think that might have been your — I don't know if that was your first book or second book, but I'd love just to go back that a little bit, because it was so intriguing to me, because I didn't know anything about you.
Avish Parashar
But your story at that point was like, "I don't have a house. I just packed everything I could into two crates, threw them in my trunk, and now I'm just driving around the country talking about the book." So A, am I remembering that right? And B, I'd love to hear about just sort of what was the reasoning and motivation behind that for you.
Stephen Shapiro
Yeah. So really good memory. So 2001, my first book came out. That was called 24/7 Innovation. That's when I left Accenture. But I've always wanted to talk to the individual, because that book was really around corporate innovation, and I wanted to find a way of connecting to people. So I thought I would write a book on personal innovation.
Stephen Shapiro
I returned from London. I lived in London for five years. In 2003, I moved back to the US. And so I had some time on my hands, and I was like, "Okay, I'm going to write another book." And somebody gave me an idea literally like a week before I hit the road. They said, "Look, if you're going to write a book and you're going to travel around, connect with people, interview people."
Stephen Shapiro
So that's what happened, is I wrote Heath Rowe at Fast Company magazine. He was the one who ran the Circle of Friends, and he connected me with a whole bunch of different cities around the country. And so I just went from city to city interviewing people. I interviewed 150 people, creative people, by the time that I was done with my 11,000 miles, three months, yes, living in my car. And it was awesome. I met some really amazing people.
Stephen Shapiro
So that was — and I didn't know where it was going to go. I mean, it was going to be a book on — the book was eventually called Goal-Free Living. It was on how to live a life without goals. It came out in 2005. That wasn't the book I intended to write, but it's just the book that happened to be created based on all these conversations.
Avish Parashar
Well, that's part of the — I mean, that's part of the innovation process, isn't it? Like you start out with one idea in mind, but you're in the moment and adjusting and seeing the feedback, and then you come up with this whole different thing, because that's where the feedback and the creativity led you.
Avish Parashar
And I like that book. I actually recently pulled that book up, Goal-Free Living, and started reading, and I was — I didn't even realize going into this talk, because I have like — I started doing like the commonplace book, like index card thing, and I've got a bunch of index cards based on that book.
Avish Parashar
I forgot to check them out. But let's go back to that, because that's an interesting — and don't worry, we will talk about Personality Poker, because obviously that's your thing.
Avish Parashar
But it is an interesting idea, especially as someone who started in this business as a consumer of Tony Robbins, and I talk about setting big goals. And so what is the contrarian point of view you have there with Goal-Free Living? And do you still follow — do you still believe in Goal-Free Living?
Stephen Shapiro
100%. So I totally believe in it. And there's a difference between goal-less living and goal-free living. So the point of Goal-Free Living is to actually be free from the burden of the goals. It means that you — like the first concept of the book is to use a compass, not a map. So most of the time what we do is we map out exactly where we want to go. I'm here, I want to get there, and here's the 15 steps, and I'm going to go measure my steps.
Stephen Shapiro
And so what we do is we measure progress based on the activities, rather than just taking a step forward and saying, "Am I still moving in the right direction? Could I shift 5 degrees to the left? Could I change 10 degrees to the right?" Whatever it is. And we start to — life starts to unfold.
Stephen Shapiro
So I describe it as meandering with purpose. What you want to do is have a sense of direction, not a specific destination, and then you meander with purpose. You let life unfold. You let your business unfold.
Stephen Shapiro
Many of the things I do weren't goals. They were things I sort of stumbled upon as I've moved forward. And most of the best things I've ever done weren't by design. They were sort of by accident. And the key thing is you have to be hyper-aware of your surroundings to just assume that whatever's happening around you might give you data points that are going to be valuable.
Avish Parashar
I love that, partly from an ego standpoint, because it's something similar to what I talk about.
Avish Parashar
And from my improv background, and you also have done improv and asthma triangle, which I'd love to chat about.
Avish Parashar
But I talk about that as when it's sort of this step-by-step.
Avish Parashar
I call it act, analyze, adjust, which is in improv, the moment you're in trouble is the moment you think you know exactly how the rest of the scene or story should go.
Avish Parashar
And instead, you just take a step, you make one offer, and then you see what happens, and then you make that adjustment.
Avish Parashar
And I'm curious where this sort of — where improv fell in your journey.
Avish Parashar
Did you already — were you already thinking this way?
Avish Parashar
And improv was something you fell into?
Avish Parashar
Or did improv help inform your thinking around that?
Avish Parashar
Or neither?
Stephen Shapiro
I always loved improv. Now, fortunately, before I went on this trip, I had done some improv training. When I lived in London, I trained with someone sort of in the 1999 to 2001 time frame, did several sessions, learned it, attended a lot of improv comedy, live improv comedy. So I wouldn't say it necessarily informed what I do, but I'm sure in the back of my mind it was always there. So it's not like in the forefront of the book.
Stephen Shapiro
The book's content is based on these 150 people that I interviewed. And what I was trying to do was I was trying to extract, what are the things that make creative people creative? Not successful, but what makes them creative? And I ended up with a list of, I think it was like 12 different common factors that all 12 had. And one of them was they have a different relationship to goals. And every time I'd show somebody the list of 12 factors, people were like, "That one's interesting. What does that mean?" And so that ended up moving away from being a factor to being the book, and everything else supported that.
Stephen Shapiro
But it is a form of improv. It's like living your life on improv. It's living your business on improv. It's like — because in improv, as you know, you give something and then you receive something, and you have to be listening carefully. And then you have to give back. And it's exactly the same type of concept here, which is life is going to give you something back. The world is going to give you something back. Your customers are going to give you something back. And if you respond with what you had planned to respond with, you're giving the wrong response. So we need to keep on adjusting. So it is really a life of improv, just on a larger scale.
Avish Parashar
I love it. It's funny. In my keynote now, I say, "I do a little improv demo," and I'm like, "Oh, you're probably looking at the thing and oh, like I would never do that." And I'm like, "But you are already, because life is not scripted." So I love that approach.
Avish Parashar
All right, so let's move forward a little bit. And before we — and I'm not sure it might relate, it might tie into Personality Poker, but I followed your stuff for a long time, and through NSA, the Speakers Association, and listened to your advice and saw your chapter program.
Avish Parashar
And one of my favorite things about you, because I can relate to this probably more than I might like to admit, is you, when you were at your job, you had a boss tell you that you are, "Stephen, you are the laziest person I know."
Avish Parashar
And you turned that into a strength, which always is an intriguing idea to me, because I self-describe myself as lazy. And I'd love to hear a little bit about that story and sort of how that kind of relates in how you teach and work with groups and build teams and cultures and things like that.
Stephen Shapiro
Yeah. So that goes back a long way. 1985.
Avish Parashar
Oh, wow.
Stephen Shapiro
I wasn't even — I didn't even graduate from college yet. So this was an engineering co-op job, like an intern type of job. I was working at Burrows, which is now Unisys, and I was in the manufacturing control department, because I was an industrial engineer focused on manufacturing. So I was working on the manufacturing control department, and I was working maybe 50 hours a week. My supervisor was working about 60 hours a week. And one day I find out she's been let go. She was laid off. I'm like, "Holy moly. I like work, but 110 hours, I am not going to be that dedicated."
Stephen Shapiro
So I came in one weekend, and I looked at everything that we did. Now, you've got to understand also, from a technology perspective, this was back in the days, we used punch cards. If people don't know what that is, look it up. I mean, this is so far in the Stone Age of technology. But I looked at what we did, and I said, "Well, there's a lot of things we're doing that I don't think we need to do."
Stephen Shapiro
So I just decided I'm going to stop doing those until somebody complains. There are some things we're doing that we're not the best people to do it. We can't do it efficiently, but I know somebody else could do it. I'm going to get somebody else to go do that work. And there's some work that we do that we are doing manually that I felt like if I just spent some time automating it, we could speed up the process.
Stephen Shapiro
And in the end, I went from 110 hours of work down to 20 hours of work. The head of the manufacturing department said I was the laziest person he's ever met, and he meant that as a compliment. And he basically called me the chief laziness officer, and my job was to help other people replicate that same kind of mindset, go around, and really be very critical about the work that we're doing.
Stephen Shapiro
And I think even though that was from a million years ago, I think that message is more critical now, because we have more work, more opportunities, more distractions, more technologies, more things calling on our time. And the biggest mistake that I think people give others, the bad advice that people give others, is they say, "I want you to do more with less." And basically that just means working harder, maybe working more efficiently, but it doesn't change the system.
Stephen Shapiro
So I'm always looking at how can I do less and get more? How can I figure out what are the activities that have the greatest impact, that unleash the greatest amount of value, and double down on my energy there, and then find other strategies for everything else? And that, to me, is the key for most organizations today, is it's not about being more efficient. It's about basically saying, "How do I change the system and the dynamics in a way that's going to play to my favor?"
Avish Parashar
So you essentially came up with the four-hour work week 20 years before Tim Ferriss wrote the book. That's basically what you did, right? You're like, "Here's what I need to do. Here's what I'm going to automate. Here's what I'm going to outsource." That's fantastic.
Avish Parashar
So what were, as you see your speaking career, and this is part of the thing I told you about earlier off recording where I'm like, "Ah, I'm going to pick your brain for my own business."
Avish Parashar
What were some of the things in your as you built your own speaking business, which I should have put this in the introduction, you are now a, and you have been for a few years, officially a NSA Speaker Association Hall of Fame speaker, so a rather successful career.
Avish Parashar
What are some of those things that you noticed in your own business that you're like, "Here's where me and maybe a lot of speakers are wasting our time, and here's the things I should be doubling down on"? I'm so curious to know what they were for you.
Stephen Shapiro
Yeah. I think it comes down to understanding, first of all, what matters most. So one of the biggest mistakes — so one of my books, I've got it, I think, a copy right here, is called Best Practices Are Stupid.
Avish Parashar
I love that title. Best Practices Are Stupid.
Stephen Shapiro
It's my favorite book title. And I think best practices are stupid, because we go to NSA, we have Influence, our convention, coming up in just a matter of days, and we're going to get a lot of advice from a lot of well-meaning people, and most of the advice we should ignore.
Stephen Shapiro
And it's not because it's bad advice. It might be bad advice for us, because who we are and what our business needs to be may not match what their business is.
Stephen Shapiro
So the first thing is to get completely clear on what you want from your business, what matters most, where do you want to be? Do you want to be a keynote speaker that does 50, 60, 80, 100, 1,000 speeches a year, and that's it, transactions?
Stephen Shapiro
Do you want to be someone who does deeper relationships? That is, maybe you do 10 speeches, and those 10 speeches turn into year-long engagements. Different models, both are great. It really depends on what you want.
Stephen Shapiro
So I think the first thing that I learned was to — my best advice is always to ignore all advice. Don't listen to what other people say. Hear it, assess it, but then put it through your own filter and understand whether or not it is right for you.
Stephen Shapiro
That's the first thing. I mean, there's a lot of other places we could go, but I think just point number one is just don't assume anybody else knows better than you know.
Avish Parashar
Yeah. And I used to tell — I used to do some Speaker Association chapters, and I used to say, like — I used to at the top of the program, I'd say, "Take everything I say with a grain of salt," because in my early career, it was a speaker would come in and say, "Here's how you have to do it," and I'd run off and do it that way.
Avish Parashar
And it'd take me six months to realize, "Oh, that doesn't work for me." And so it was like for every step forward, it was two steps back.
Avish Parashar
Let's touch upon that book, because I love the title, The Best Practices Are Stupid, and tie that into the laziness thing. Am I correct in — because I'm thinking about how to apply this for myself.
Avish Parashar
When you were booked for a speaking engagement, you would just send the planner or the decision maker a copy of that book and then say, "Just pick the three points from this book that you think are most relevant for your group," which I would think dramatically reduced your prep time, because instead of you trying to figure it out, they just say, "Talk about these three things." Is that correct?
Stephen Shapiro
First of all, I have to say, you have the most incredible memory. You're talking about things that were from the Stone Age, and I love it, because some of these are maybe good practice for me to come back to. Yes. So.
Avish Parashar
Well, I remember the things that had an impact and were I found beneficial. So that's a credit to you as well.
Stephen Shapiro
That's awesome. Yes. So Best Practices Are Stupid, at the time, sort of embodied all of my work. So all of my intellectual property was boiled down into 41,000-word chapters, 1,000 or 41,000-word strategies. And sometimes they were on different aspects of innovation, whether it might be collaboration or open innovation. They might be on culture. They might be on prioritization. So everything that I had from every book and every concept was basically distilled down into those 40 pieces.
Stephen Shapiro
And so I would say to the event planner, it's like, "Here's the book. Read it. Tell me which are the ones" — there's some that I always talk about, because I feel like they're necessary. But tell me the ones that this really intrigues you based on what you are going through right now, you think it'll help, and then which ones do you want me to just make sure I don't mention for whatever reason.
Stephen Shapiro
And it was — now, I don't do this now, but it was incredibly powerful, because the conversations I would have with my clients, we would get laser-focused on what it is they want, what they need, what they don't want. And then it also started to introduce the concepts of language and what are the challenges that they're facing and how do we address those challenges. So yeah, I used to do that. I don't now, and maybe I'll go back, but you never know.
Avish Parashar
Well, I think I remember that, because I wrote this book recently that came out, and it's got a framework with six steps. And when I do a keynote, depending on the length, I really only have time to go into one of the six. And that kind of leads to a lead magnet, like, "Oh, you know, here, you'll get the rest of the six in this PDF."
Avish Parashar
But I was thinking about — this popped in my head, your advice, and I'm like, "Oh, I should send a book or maybe a report based on the book to the planner and be like, 'Which of these six do you want to make sure I hit in my time in the keynote?'" Because like you said, it leads to deeper conversation, and it makes sure it's customized to them. So I love that.
Avish Parashar
All right. So now let's kind of continue on here and the thing you've been working on now for a while, because you've been doing Personality Poker for a long time, and you wrote a book called Personality Poker, and now you came out with another book based on Personality Poker. So for people who are unfamiliar with Personality Poker, could you explain what that is and how that works?
Stephen Shapiro
Yeah. So Personality Poker is a card game. They are poker cards. If anybody was watching a video version of this, they're poker cards with words. And 52 cards, suits, colors, numbers, words on them that describe behavioral attributes like creative, empathetic, organized, rational.
Stephen Shapiro
And what we do is we trade cards. So everybody gets five random cards, and we do two rounds of trading. The first round of trading is focused on trying to get five cards where the words best describe how you see yourself. The second round of trading gives you a chance to further improve your hand, but also to gift cards to others.
Stephen Shapiro
So when you're done, you end up with five cards that describe how you see yourself, and you will have received gift cards from others that tell you how the world sees you. And then we go through an interpretation process, and the suits, the colors, and the numbers all have meaning. And I can look at somebody's hand and instantly tell them exactly who they are, but more importantly, who they are not.
Stephen Shapiro
And that really is the key aspect of Personality Poker, is if you know who you are not, if you know the suits you don't have in your hand, that tells you who you need. They're not weaknesses. They're opportunities for collaboration. And so that's the concept developed 20 years ago, and based on an assessment I developed 30 years ago, but it was much more boring, the original assessment. The card version is much more exciting.
Avish Parashar
So first off, it's a great book. For anyone listening, the title of the new book is You're Not Playing with a Full Deck. I love the title. It's not an insult. The premise there is that you have strengths, which are your cards, but that means you need to find people on the other side.
Avish Parashar
So I think one of the best ways maybe we can chat about this is, again, through some free consulting for me, or I guess this would be more free coaching. So I took the assessment, and it was great. So I got a there are a variety of types of people that listen to this podcast. I think you got employees with some solopreneurs and whatnot.
Avish Parashar
And so I'm curious for both, because 100% I can totally see this why any company, team would want it, because it's about collaboration. Do you think this could work or be beneficial to solopreneurs, freelancers, individuals as well?
Stephen Shapiro
Oh, 100%. I mean, basically I say, as long as you have a personality, you are someone who could get value from this system. And the reason for that is, as a solopreneur, we need to, again, understand who we are not. So I am in Personality Poker primarily a diamond. The diamonds are the scatterbrained, creative ones. So we might be more disorganized, a little messier, but we are great at connecting ideas.
Stephen Shapiro
I've got a little bit of the skeptical spade. So spades are on facts and data. They like to dig for data. They're a little more analytical. And I have some heart in me. I like people sometimes, not all the time, but I do like people for the most part. But the suit that I am absolutely positively missing are clubs.
Stephen Shapiro
The clubs are the planners. They plan the work and work the plan. And for me, I find a goal-free guy, plans are restrictive and limiting. And so I don't like plans. I don't like structure, and I fight it. The problem is, if I don't have plans and I don't have some structure I'm not saying it has to be a rigid structure, but some level of structure, nothing gets done.
Stephen Shapiro
So if I understand that, either I could try to become better at that, or I can collaborate with others. And fortunately, today we also have technology who could be our collaboration partners. So I have a number of agents that I have set up in AI, for example, that are my club. They run assessments every night, and they tell me what I need to do today, and they ask me and hound me and yell at me if I don't do them. And that's good, because I need that. So anybody could get value from this process.
Avish Parashar
That's fascinating about the AI agent thing. I'll have to dig into that. But let me so it's funny you mentioned the diamonds are scatterbrained creatives. I did the assessment. Unsurprisingly, I had three diamonds that came up. One heart, but it was a two, and maybe go into this a little bit in a moment, and an ace of clubs. So I'm a little bit because, again, my background, so much goal-setting person. I'm very goal-oriented, at least I think I am. When you say goal-free living, I like the idea of goal direction or not goal less. But if I don't have a goal, I'm like, "Well, what am I doing?" Now, this doesn't mean I'm always great at following through and achieving the goal, but I need to have it.
Avish Parashar
So first off, what I love is it goes deeper. It's easy to say, "Oh, four suits, which one you get the most of, that's who you are." But you really go much deeper into this. And one of the ways is the numbers have meaning too. And the lower the number can mean one thing, the middle numbers, and then the face cards. And it's inner and outer energy. And not surprisingly, for me, I had no face cards. I had the ace, which I guess is like that, and all numbers. So could you explain a little bit about kind of what I'm talking about there with how the numbers and the face cards and how they sort of relate to what the suits mean?
Stephen Shapiro
Yeah. So the two, three, fours of each suit are what I describe as your strong suit on steroids. It's sort of the consequence of your strong suit. So for the diamonds, like me, you have the two, three, four cards are disorganized and scattered. For the spades, who like data, the two, three, four cards could be a know-it-all, which means you're not a lot of fun to be around all the time. The clubs, my favorite one, the three of clubs, the anal retentive card. It's the person who is so detail-oriented, obsessive, compulsive, and the hearts might be overly sensitive or self-sacrificing.
Stephen Shapiro
So the two, three, four cards aren't bad, though. I always joke that the difference between a Timex and a Rolex is that anal retentive three of clubs card. We need it, but we also need to temper it. My being disorganized is useful to a point, because disorganized, scattered, messy people are typically more creative, based on a lot of studies. But gone too far, it can become overwhelming. And so that's the one that we want to temper.
Stephen Shapiro
And then the five, six, seven, eight, nine are the lower numbers, which mean that they are you tend to like to work more with predictability, and you like to work more in smaller groups. So the five, six, seven, eight, nine of hearts, they are great listeners. They don't have a lot of friends, but the friends they have, they're very close to.
Stephen Shapiro
The ten through ace of hearts, the ten, jack, queen, king, and ace of hearts are the social butterflies. They're great talkers. They know a lot of people. They just don't know anyone particularly well, because they are a mastered networker. So for all the suits, the numbers have meaning, as well as the colors also have meaning. So it's just a really powerful, dynamic way to because it's not just, "Okay, these are the four things that you are." No, there's nuances to each of them, and that's what really makes it, I think, so incredibly powerful.
Avish Parashar
Yeah. I mean, you really stumbled upon or not stumbled, but created something really unique and powerful, because it is really simple, but it's also got a lot of complexity and profoundness in it.
Avish Parashar
And it was not surprising to you, but I did as I was looking at my assessment and the thing. I'm like, "All right, that sounds very much like me." So if we were using me as a case study, I have a six of diamonds, which is insightful, an eight of diamonds, which is visionary, and a nine of diamonds, which is creative.
Avish Parashar
I have an ace of clubs, which is goal-oriented, and then the two of hearts, oversensitive. Not surprising to me at all. I've been working on this myself.
Avish Parashar
I love approval. I'm a people pleaser. So immediately I noticed no spades on there.
Avish Parashar
So you're saying to maximize my effectiveness that I would want to find someone who's strong in spades or maybe use an AI agent. And the spades were the data and analytical ones. Is that correct?
Stephen Shapiro
Right. So the spades dig for data. They want to know the scientific validation. They want to know the data. When they're making decisions, they will make it based on data, whereas the hearts, the opposite, would make it based on gut. So they're sort of those are the two extremes there. But your numbers are interesting too. I always find the numbers for many people to be fascinating. So a lot of professional speakers, surprisingly, are lower numbers.
Stephen Shapiro
We tend to think of a professional speaker as being somebody who's extremely outgoing, but most of the research says exactly the opposite. Being on stage is sort of a solitary type of endeavor, because you're not really in the middle of things. And so it's not surprising that you would be the five through nine, primarily that two of hearts, that overly sensitive or self-sacrificing card is a lower card too, even though it's a two, three, four. It falls into the category of the more solitary work, more inwardly focused rather than outwardly focused. So your only high one is a club.
Stephen Shapiro
And I would guess that if we dug deeper into it and here's the important thing with all of this, I'm not a big fan of labeling. So even though we do say, "Okay, you're a diamond or heart or club or whatever it might be," the two most important things I think are, one is who you are not is more important than who you are. But I also think the conversation that takes place with others, because people see us differently than we see ourselves, and that conversation then helps us not just better understand who we are, but how we work better with other people.
Stephen Shapiro
So your ace of clubs, I am wondering there's a difference when we have more time we dig deeper into it. We talk about the difference between innate traits and learned traits. The innate traits are the things which are sort of this naturally occurring who we are almost from birth. It's part of our DNA when life is in flow. And then the learned traits are the things that we've taken on in order to be successful. And it's important for us to distinguish them.
Stephen Shapiro
And I do wonder, maybe that ace of clubs, that goal-oriented card, is something you learned to become good at because it helped you achieve things. But maybe it's something which isn't energizing all the time. And that's really what I do is what I'm trying to always look at is what energizes us.
Avish Parashar
I feel like I should.
Stephen Shapiro
Does energize you.
Avish Parashar
I feel like I need to recline on the couch because we're about to go into therapy, it feels like. But it's fascinating, though, because it's funny. Maybe this will help me my next book.
Avish Parashar
I've had this idea in my head for a long time when I look at the things I've done successfully in my life. And at the core, they all started with fun. And I came up with this little phrase. I'm probably not the only one, but follow the fun.
Avish Parashar
I'm like, "I got a third-degree black belt in karate. I was a teacher. I was doing all this." And I started doing and kept doing in the beginning because it was fun. I started doing improv comedy because it looked like fun. I started doing stand-up comedy because it looked like fun. And the more I leaned into that, the better I did at them. And I rose to some decently high levels in those things.
Avish Parashar
And then because I started an improv group after college, I had these high dreams of, "I want to make the second city of Philadelphia." That's when I got turned on to goal setting and motivational speakers and Tony Robbins. And I'm like, "Is it possible that I've learned that?"
Avish Parashar
Do you feel that if it's a trait that you've learned and are good at, that leaning into that might be then holding you back a little bit because you're not necessarily leaning into what is innate within you?
Stephen Shapiro
That is my belief. Now, look, it doesn't mean that we don't do those things. I mean, we can't just do what we feel like doing. We do have to lean into the reason why we learn certain traits is because that does help us become successful. So there's nothing wrong with that, but it's also understanding maybe there's a point in time where it does hold us back.
Stephen Shapiro
So maybe, like you said, everything started with fun. That's really cool. That's the opposite of an ace of clubs. Because the diamonds in general, I always say the diamonds don't care where they're going as long as they're having a good time getting there.
Avish Parashar
Sounds perfect.
Stephen Shapiro
And so if you took money off the table, and if you took status off the table, and you took success off the table, and you took social pressure off the table, it's like sometimes one of the downsides of being part of an association like the National Speakers Association is you see everybody else is doing 1,000 speeches a year, and they're charging $10 billion a speech.
Stephen Shapiro
And you think, "Well, I should be doing that." And then it puts pressure on us. But if you were to say, "None of those things matter, and I want to be the best version of myself," maybe it starts getting at to who we really are, not who we wish we were or who we've become.
Avish Parashar
Well, you and I are going to talk in the next few years because one of the six steps in my I turned YASAN into an acronym, and one of the six is to explore and express your core.
Avish Parashar
And as I was reading this, I was like, "Oh, personality poker could be a really nifty way to quickly help people sort of identify at their core and where they should be leaning, putting their energy in."
Avish Parashar
And I know you offer a whole licensing thing and then training and stuff. So as I move forward with this whole process, I may start weaving some personality poker into my training. I'll chat with you about that.
Stephen Shapiro
Sweet.
Avish Parashar
Okay. A lot of great personal coaching, a lot of great information. I can see even as an individual already profound, and I'm already rethinking about how I'm going to be looking at things based on just this conversation.
Avish Parashar
But let's talk a little about, I think, my assumption of more of what you do, and I think the origination of personality poker is organization and teams. And I had the pleasure of seeing your video recording for Keeno.
Avish Parashar
So I know how it works. But you got a whole bunch of well, rather than me explaining it, tell us what a personality poker keynote looks like when you book Stephen Shapiro, Hall of Fame CPA speaker, to come do personality poker.
Avish Parashar
What does it look like? And then we can talk about what they take away with it.
Stephen Shapiro
Yeah. And I want to distinguish what we do in a typical 60-minute keynote versus what can be possible, because there's two different things going on. The video you're referring to, it was about 800 people. We were playing personality poker.
Stephen Shapiro
It's an event. It really is an event because every person before you get there gets five random cards. And I basically just start off talking about why opposites don't attract, they detract. We therefore hang around with people who are similar to us, and as a result, we hire people who fit the mold. And then I joke, "If you only hire people who fit the mold, eventually your organization will grow mold." And I talk about personality poker as sort of the antidote to moldy companies.
Stephen Shapiro
And we do two rounds of training. So the first round of training is all 800 people in that video stand up, and they take their five cards, and they try to get rid of cards that they don't want, trading with other people. The second round of trading is where it gets more fun. And we talked a little bit about this, but now we play 52-card pickup. In this case, it's probably like 5,000-card pickup, where we throw cards all over the floor. We do put some on tables, high tops for people who don't want to or can't bend over. But people love getting on the floor, picking up cards. And so they improve their hand, and they give cards to other people. And we go through the process of interpreting the suits, the colors, and numbers, like you and I did.
Stephen Shapiro
But the big value is not about if you think about where the value is, it's not about individual personality. It's not even about how you work with one other person. So it's others. Where the real value comes from is teams, meetings, and organization. We're talking about culture. We're talking about collaboration. We're talking about innovation. And many times in a 60-minute keynote, we don't cover that unless it is an audience where that's what they specifically want me to go deeper into. But the real value is if you understand who you are missing on your team, for example.
Stephen Shapiro
So if I go to a team and we have software that actually now facilitates all this, which we could talk about. But if you're on a team and you have most teams in most large organizations, in most operationally oriented divisions are going to be largely clubs, the planners and the executors, the spades, the data people, maybe a little bit of heart, very little diamond. So I can go onto a team and very quickly assess why they're struggling to grow. If you're missing diamonds, you're basically implementing solutions, but they're the same old solutions you've always had.
Stephen Shapiro
If you go to a team and you're missing clubs, you're probably struggling with implementation, so you're incredibly inefficient. If you're missing spades, you might be implementing solutions, but they're not solving real problems. And so we can very quickly pinpoint and diagnose where things are breaking down, why collaboration is breaking down, what you need to do. And then we can also look at the culture. And for me, when I look at culture, to me, that's the personality of the organization. What I mean by that is it's what's recognized, rewarded, and promoted.
Stephen Shapiro
And what we typically do is we recognize, reward, and promote based on a very limited set of attributes. So most large companies are club-dominant cultures. That means if you look at performance management systems and all the ways that we promote people, it's based on who produces, who helps us hit the numbers. Maybe the diamonds don't feel like they are actually at home there, but there's a cost. So if we can understand who is recognized and rewarded and who is not recognized and rewarded, but it's costing us, now we can put in measures to make sure we are, from a cultural perspective, not changing the culture, but broadening what is valued by the culture.
Avish Parashar
It's so powerful and quick to see here's kind of where the gaps are.
Avish Parashar
And I would also assume that after doing a program like this and the explanations you give, that it should make everyone also more tolerant of people's different approaches.
Avish Parashar
So if you're a creative and you've got someone who's constantly talking about the numbers and the data, and that person annoys the heck out of you, after a program like this, you realize, "Okay, that's not me, but that's serving a very important function now."
Avish Parashar
So it almost helps build that morale and team culture as well.
Stephen Shapiro
Yeah. I always say that the person you like the least is the person you need the most. It's like the person who is least like us is probably going to annoy us, and that should be a sign we need them. And so if we can start taking the time because playing with a full deck doesn't mean we take all the different suits and just lock them in a room. That's wildly inefficient. It doesn't work.
Stephen Shapiro
So it's, yes, having the different range of suits, but it's also then making sure that each person plays to their strong suit, that we're dealing out the work, that everybody's doing what they do best, that we are shuffling the deck, that we are not just creating new silos, but everybody does collaborate, and we have a deep appreciation for what everybody brings to the table. So it's a very systematic process to diagnose what's missing for an organization or team and then help them implement and institute new ways of operating that help them operate at a higher level.
Avish Parashar
I got to say that bit of advice that the person who annoys you the most is the person you need the most or whatever. Yeah, I hate that advice. Not because it's wrong, but man, it's annoying because it's like, "No, I want to surround myself with just people who make me laugh and who I like." But I think back and I'm like, "That probably flowed because I got this person who's really detail-oriented, and that's not me." And I used to hate them nagging, but it really helped keep things moving.
Avish Parashar
And it's obviously a lot of great takeaways, but that's probably one of the biggest ones. Like, "Yeah, stop just looking for people that you like and that are like you, and look for the gaps and how that's going to really make the whole better than the sum of its parts." All right, we're going to kind of move towards the end here. A couple more one or two more things I want to ask you about, kind of going on a higher level now.
Avish Parashar
So we've got the keynote, and you've mentioned a few times work with the organization. And again, I think you're going to start to feel like I'm stalking you because I keep remembering and pulling these things that I've done and follow some of your work. But I don't even know if you know this, but a couple of years ago, you just randomly, I don't know why, put out a PDF that was like, "How I roll out culture change in an organization." And I'm like, "Oh, I want to do that with my work." So I downloaded that, and I took notes.
Avish Parashar
And you've got this whole process. And I'm curious, number one, do you follow that process as part of one of your offerings with personality poker? And for someone listening who's like, "Oh yeah, I could see this working organizationally," from a high level, what is your approach to creating widespread culture change in an organization?
Stephen Shapiro
Yeah. So everything that we're talking about really started in 1996 when I was at Accenture, and I was leading this 20,000-person innovation practice. And we were launching something called Process Excellence Principles. So if somebody was at Accenture in 1996, you might remember Process Excellence Principles. And so what we needed to do, the challenge we had was we had this belief that we needed to move away from process thinking to innovation thinking. We needed to move away from software thinking to value-oriented thinking. And we needed to figure out a way to get 20,000 people to think and operate differently.
Stephen Shapiro
And so the way we did that was we developed all the materials, but then we did some we had sort of these groups of people. So we had this small group of Uber experts that we trained. We put them through an intensive training program so they could then understand these principles. And then those people delivered them to the rest of the teams. And so we did 200 training sessions in nine months to 20,000 people. And what's fascinating is the impact lasted for years. I left the company five years after we started launching this program, and the impact was still being felt at that point. So it was incredibly powerful.
Stephen Shapiro
And that is the methodology that I use is how do we build sort of the masters, the deep experts in the methodology? And then how do they work with the ambassadors who are the ones who are going to start to spread the message wider? And that is like I have a mastery program. It's an apprenticeship program. And the mastery program, there's one for personality poker, and there's one for my fast innovation methodology. But basically, that's what we do is we say, "Hey, if this is what you want to bring to the organization, we need to find a way of truly cascading this in a way that's going to be powerful and meaningful."
Stephen Shapiro
And the only way to do that is to first take a group of people and have them not just do a train-the-trainer session, but actually be able to apply it, do it, think the way I think, talk the way I think, talk the way I talk, and actually solve problems for real. It's not a training session. It's like taking this back to the real world, working with your team, and then cascading it further. And so yes, this is what I like to do.
Avish Parashar
I love it. And it's such a great way to actually permeate the change. As someone who does mostly keynotes right now, it's great. It's fun. You change some minds. You change some thinking. But are they really going back? And the way you're talking about it is how do you really create that long-lasting change?
Avish Parashar
All right, well, we're about to finish up here. And this has been fascinating on multiple levels, and I'm sure everyone listening has got a lot out of it as well.
Avish Parashar
I'm going to finish up with one final question just a moment. Before I do that, if people want to connect with you, learn more about you, get Personality Poker, the book or the program, or talk to you about maybe bringing it to their organization, what are the best ways for them to reach out and connect to you?
Stephen Shapiro
So if you want to learn more about me, you go to theinnovationspeaker.com. That's a lot easier than my name, which has multiple spellings and pronunciations, and nobody gets it right.
Stephen Shapiro
And for Personality Poker, just go to personalitypoker.com. And yeah, you can learn about the book. You can learn about the systems that we sell. We have a DIY system. We have technologies that help enable the process of culture change inside the organization. So all that should be at personalitypoker.com.
Avish Parashar
All right. Fantastic. And we will put those links in our show notes as well.
Avish Parashar
So Steven, I'd like to finish up here with my final question, which is what I ask everyone is my final question.
Avish Parashar
I talk about the improv idea of saying yes and instead of yes but. And I do that because I honestly believe the world would be a better place if everyone just started with a default position of yes and.
Avish Parashar
So I'm curious, for you, what would you say is one small thing that you believe if everyone did, it would make the world a better place?
Stephen Shapiro
I think it would be assume the person who annoys you the most is the person you need the most. If we can look at everyone through a different lens and just ask ourselves, "What do they bring to the table that I'm missing? What are they able to do that I can't? What do they see that I can't?" Then I think it would be a different world. I mean, let's face it. We are in an environment right now where we assume if somebody is different than us, they're bad, they're wrong.
Stephen Shapiro
But I like to believe if somebody sees something differently than I do, they're right in their own world. I need to understand what they see and what does that bring to me that I might be missing. So that would be my best advice.
Avish Parashar
That is fantastic. And to put a bow on it, that sounds very much like approaching other people with a mindset of yes and.
Stephen Shapiro
Yes and.
Avish Parashar
All right. Thank you so much, Steven. This was fantastic. Really appreciate having you on.
Stephen Shapiro
It was my pleasure. So happy to be here.
Avish Parashar
Whoop. I almost stopped that.