This is an unsponsored review of the book “Your Next Five Moves” by Patrick Bet-David.
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Patrick Bet-David (PBD) is an American business owner who is the host of the Youtube! channel Valuetainment with over, to-date, 2.9M subscribers. PBD went from Iran to founding his own financial services firm PHP and has become a leading Youtube! personality with a number of compelling video interviews with the likes of Ray Dalio, Kevin Hart and the late Kobe Bryant.
His 2020 hardcover book “Your Five Next Moves: Master the Art of Business Strategy” is about 280 pages and covers the idea that a majority of today’s most successful business leaders and organisations are successful because of their ability to look ahead, to see what is in front of them, to see the plays coming up and behind able to react, to outstrategise or out-think the competition where it counts.
Like the game Chess, PBD argues, the top players in the field of business and use clarity, strategy, tactics, insight, experience to frame the opportunity, risk, investment and payoff; mixing foresight and hindsight, data, analytics and ideas into strategic plays.
The five moves are:
- Master knowing yourself
- Master the ability to reason
- Master the building of the right team
- Master the strategy to scale
- Master the power plays
Told through a prism of stories, Your Next Five Moves, frames the five moves through PBD’s personal storytelling of his personal journey with success, failures and what he learnt from it and links it to one of the five moves.
As such, the book is part-auto biography, part-business thinking and part-advocacy, and frames ideas of introspection, goal setting, the ability of removing emotion when approaching difficult conversations and using strategy to position outcomes to your favour through negotiation and offering something in return.
From the outset, the book starts from the position you must get clarity of who you are, where you are at, where you want to be, who you want to be, and what are you willing to do to get there. Introspective activities include a Personality Audit, and a challenge to use the Five Whys to keep asking why until a purpose is revealed.
Post introspective ideas, later chapters talk about the reasoning and sense making when making decisions, one of the ideas PBD offers is that of an Investment Time Return (ITR) formula that he encourages his team to embrace in every deal, or opportunity.
PBD also offers the idea that in meetings, using stoic thoughts or analysing what is being said all be parts of the plays one makes to ensure high emotion can be avoided.
One tool PBD advocates using when making strategic decisional making is a Solve for X worksheet (which is included in the book) where he advocates his employees and himself to use to evaluate the real underpinning cause, and align this with urgency, people needed, the available solutions, to list possible negative outcomes and what new protocols can be birthed.
In move 3, PBD reiterates the idea you can’t get to the top of the mountain by yourself. You’re going to need a team, and the more strategic thinker will ask what the make-up of the team will be, how do you attract and keep talent beyond simple financial compensation models.
In move 4, PBD mentions that if you want to be strategic – you need to think long term, that your business needs to work without you, that to move from the solo-business to the micro to the macro business you’re going to need to scale. Although the materials of scaling aren’t included, it would seem that PBD links team, processes, internal and external competitiveness, branding and marketing together to create a golden thread of what scaling actually means.
Finally in move 5, PBD outlines a list of strategic power plays that may help when things aren’t going well, and conversely; what to do when things are going well
One of the things that comes across from the book is PBD’s competitiveness, and imposing a demanding approach to his team to be as competitive as himself, with processes, systems, discussion and techniques to ask his team not only to move quicker, but ask how to get better.
Whether it’s forcing his employees to read books, write reports; or if its asking his team to be analytical – its clear that continuous improvement, process and being competitive is very important to PBD; whether its replicable I’m not sure.
The book is well written, is throughly from a storytelling perspective. If you’re expecting the book to be technical, I’m sorry to disappoint you. The book is not a tactical playbook chock full of strategic plays that one can play; I think this is a bit of a shame, considering how the book was marketing and how PBD framed it. I recall in his videos PBD would state how it took him over 2 years to write the book, and how over 100+ strategic business books have influenced his thinking. Given this, one might expect a consolidation or curation of what these business books have taught him and how they reflect against the five moves he advocates. However, this does not occur.
Concretely, the book offers a few worksheets and a website with resources and other books to read. It offers ideas that perhaps you can use to help frame your current situation and see how it might apply. However, the book given its position from a storytelling perspective is not a book about corporate level strategy, or how a micro business might use the same plays to be competitive. In this regard, the level of strategy offered is surface level, personal level; and this is fine.
From a critique point of view, the book sometimes conflates situational awareness with strategy. Perhaps this is intentional. Many times the examples given are just situational awareness, how to develop it, how to react to it, how to predict it. In this way, I think its fine to do this. But just don’t expect book-smart, corporate level strategy. It doesn’t consider how Porter’s Five Forces actually works in the real world. It doesn’t look at how McKinsey or other big-name c-suite consultants use strategy (which I think is a shame), and it doesn’t say – “this is how they do it, but this is how we do it in the real world, and this is what you should learn from it”.
One of the formula’s given is the ITR (Investment, Time and Return) formula. There is tendency that PBD has to frame everything from a transactional point of view. And I’m not 100% convinced that every decision that a business makes is transactional, or has a capitalist foundation. Despite this critique, I feel such forumlas are timely, useful reminders to readers that business owners must not only be situationally aware of the offer, but also the payoff. Despite its pull, a business case may not be the only qualifier of whether a decision is a worthwhile one to pursuit.
Given all of this, I think the book is very good; well written and has some good reasonable ideas in it that can be re-read and can help re-iterate that the difference between a solo business, micro business, macro business and big name business is processes, systems, methods, strategy, the ability to be humble, to learn.
I would say its a worthwhile read and would recommend reading it. Just don’t expect a corporate level critique of book academic strategy and real-world strategy.
Overall: 7/10
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