If you want to win, you must arm yourself with the power knowledge gives.

It is possible to run a psychological test/personality profile on someone, without ever having met them, or spoken to them, and without anyone realizing that such a test is taking place.

Commonly, the test most used is the Myers-Briggs, which we are not particularly fond of, since so few people use the results correctly. However the Myers-Briggs has been around for decades, and one of the reasons it has been around for so long is that it does have a predictive value, properly used.

What value does this have? If you are in a serious negotiation, wouldn’t it be nice to have some prediction as to how the party on the other side of the table might react to various strategies?

Or, competitively, as in the following example.

Able Company, a well established, and profitable manufacturer in the electronics components industry, was a prime competitor to Baker Company. In this industry, first to market usually wins the market. Speed is of the essence.

Able announced that a new CEO, Charley Brown, would be joining them soon, from outside the industry, which had in fact been one of the requirements of the board of directors. Baker wanted to know how Charley would run the company, and how they might gain competitive advantage from this information.

First information on Charley was ordinary, albeit a bit short on experience. He had been moderately successful in only one other senior management position, and his departure was apparently friendly. He had huge capacity for hard work, was highly intelligent, articulate and well liked. He was particularly fond of intellectual discussion, particularly those that looked at new ways of doing old things. He was known by the public to be very compassionate to the rank and file.

After testing, further digging in the directions indicated by the test produced some interesting results. The test showed him to have a very high degree of imagination, but of limited attention span, to the degree that he bored easily with details and projects that did not excite his imagination. He was one who rarely took responsibility for things that went wrong.

 He did however have a great need to control the decision making process, and a need to control every detail. He was expected to spend a great deal of time on employee relations programs such as maternity leave and issues such as environmental issues and community relations, but be short on people interests.

Former subordinates indicated a lack of trust in others decisions, and an immediate placement of blame on others for any wrong decision that he made. Successes, on the other hand, were all his fault, and he was always first to appear at the press conference. They also indicated that he waited inordinate amounts of time to issue decisions, waiting till every detail was in. Such traits are suicidal where speed to market is the essential ingredient.

In fact, he soon became preoccupied with non revenue producing aspects of the business, and Baker was able to put out the word that he would make a great candidate for some high profile community projects, which Charley happily accepted, killing further amounts of his time. This, in turn, reduced his speed of decisions. This transfer of skills strengthened Baker Company, and accelerated Able Company's downward spiral.

Very soon Baker was able to cherry pick senior management and technical people who were frustrated at the politics, the need to constantly cover ones backside on any decision, and lack of action that developed.  The same people who were the core of Ables’ previous successes.

His Myers-Briggs  personality type was ENFP