Comparing Myers-Briggs vs. The Predictive Index

A lifelong MBTI practitioner’s take on PI.

What’s a woman who’s built her career around Myers-Briggs (MBTI) to do when her husband buys The Predictive Index (PI)? I’m not talking about buying the PI assessment solution, mind you. I’m talking about him buying the whole darn company.

PI is a tool that can be considered a competitive product to the MBTI, and the latter is the framework that I have spent my entire career studying, evangelizing, and building a business around.

I think the only answer is: Learn PI, love it, and live it. At least that’s what this Persuasive did.

My husband is the CEO of PI now. I like to think he bought the company because of me (perhaps that is what any highest B might think, right?). Tools like PI’s Behavioral Assessment and the MBTI personality assessment are incredibly helpful for understanding people. And, as we both learned at graduate school long ago, success and happiness in business comes down to having an amazing team filled with A-players doing what they are best at every day. Both of these tools help make that possible.

A lot of my clients ask which tool I think is better. My answer is this: It depends on their needs. What are they trying to accomplish? How are they going to use it? Who is going to take the assessment?

Where did these tools come from?

MBTI is the “Myers Briggs Type Indicator” and was developed by a mother-daughter team, Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers, to help people better understand one another following World War II. The MBTI was based on the theories of Carl Jung, a Swiss psychologist who postulated that people had different preferences for the way they would see the world and take in information, as well as the way they would make decisions about that information. Briggs and Myers developed a questionnaire that made Jung’s theories more accessible to the public. This questionnaire, which would later be called the MBTI, identifies a person as one of 16 different personality types. The MBTI was further vetted by teams of psychometricians and academic experts from our nation’s top universities.