Innovation Insights
by Stephen Shapiro
It’s official. April 21, 2026 marks the launch of my 8th book: You’re Not Playing with a Full Deck: Why the People Who Drive You Crazy Also Drive Breakthrough Results I am looking for people who want to help me
Most of us, in fact nearly all of us, are not playing with a full deck. What do I mean by that? No one succeeds on their own. We all need the perspectives of others. For example, I am creative
Twenty years ago, I wrote Goal-Free Living with a controversial premise: our personal lives are better without goal obsession. So can this work in business? Absolutely. I’ve seen it firsthand: → Clients selling more after eliminating sales goals → Companies
Wishing you a 2026 where everyone is playing with a full deck. Happy New Year!
It’s that time of year when we set resolutions for 2026. But maybe one resolution should be to stop making resolutions! Twenty years ago, Wiley published my Goal-Free Living book. The premise is that goals are not the key to
Most teams don’t struggle because they lack talent. They struggle because they surround themselves with people who think the same way. This was my message to 800 leaders at the SHRM Linkage Institute, where we played Personality Poker. After the
When do you trust others, and when do you trust your gut? In 2011, Portfolio Penguin bought the rights to two of my books. The working title of one of them was The Little Book of BIG Innovation Ideas. The
Steve Jobs gave a brief but powerful speech at The Academy of Achievement in 1982. Here is a transcription of a portion of that speech – edited for space and emphasis. It’s about the creativity and making connections… Have you
I’m pleased to announce that my most recent book, PIVOTAL: Creating Stability in an Uncertain World, has been translated into traditional/complex Chinese. You can see the cover on this post or on an IT website in Taiwan that wrote an
Two months ago, I set out to transform my 60,000-word Personality Poker book into a Reader’s Digest version—15,000 to 20,000 words with short chapters and detailed action steps. The content was already there. I just needed to update it, cut
I swore I was not going to write another book, at least not for a long time. But I couldn’t help myself. I have the first draft done for book #8: You’re Not Playing with a Full Deck: Bust Silos,
The other day, I posted about how children start life as red cards: creative, playful, connected. But as we age and learn to fit in and be successful, we start to collect black cards: logical, organized, systematic. The question I
Many years ago, I was friends with Tom Peters’ brand manager. I asked him for his definition of a brand. He gave me six simple words: “What your customers say it is.” It’s not your logo. It’s not your colors.
Somewhere along the way, most of us stop being who we really are. After my Personality Poker session last night, I spoke with an attendee in his 60s, a semi-retired grandfather. He picked mostly red cards, the ones about people,
Chuck Barris, the creator and host of The Gong Show, was one of my childhood heroes. I always wanted to be like him, a game show host with big, quirky ideas. Although my TV career never happened, I do get
Most authors think they have a sales problem. They don’t. A colleague told me, “If more people bought my book, I’d get more speeches and coaching gigs.” My response: “You don’t have a sales problem. You have a reader problem.”
When I founded my business in 2001, my title was “Innovation Speaker and Author.” Descriptive but boring. In 2010, I switched to “Innovation Evangelist” (and sometimes “Chief Innovation Evangelist”). It was more interesting, but some event organizers were not crazy
When I was a kid, I had a dream: I wanted to be a game show host on television. That dream is gone, but not forgotten. Thirteen years ago, it came close to happening. I was in the pitch rooms
Big milestone today—I just received the author proof for the new edition of Personality Poker! Holding it in my hands is both exciting and surreal. This updated version brings the concepts to life in a fresh way, making it easier
Do you have a book inside you that’s waiting to be shared with the world? Are you worried the process will be too complex, time-consuming, or expensive? Traditional publishing can be all of those things. But there are faster, simpler,
What if you could go from a blank sheet of paper to a launched product in less than two hours? That’s the challenge I gave myself this past week—and the result surprised even me. The Spark On Saturday, I tuned
Sometimes the best ideas come from mistakes. Case in point: I asked an AI tool to redesign the cover of my Personality Poker book. It got most of it right… except for one curious detail. Instead of “Personality Poker,” it
I love card magic, and one of my favorite routines is by Shawn Farquhar. In it, he performs beautiful cardistry to Sting’s Shape of My Heart. The routine is amazing, and the song is one I love. Sting’s lyrics are
In 2010, the Personality Poker book was published by Portfolio Penguin. But as I mentioned in my previous post, due to some design issues, we pulled the book from stores in 2014. For over ten years, that book remained unavailable
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