Your Next Five Moves: Master the Art of Business Strategy Paperback – 1 Jun. 2021

This business book stands out because it provides good advice in a concise and relatable way, and, because it does so with the authority of a guy who has actually achieved things and (as far as I'm aware) actually follows his own guidance. There's no shortage of 'business gurus' around now, many of whom couldn't run a bath if they had a gun to their head.The book is broken into chapters by theme and promotes a proactive forward looking approach to planning; many of the pitfalls of strategy are covered, and, all the lessons are directly applicable with advice how to apply them. There's nothing here which is too abstract or theoretical, it is all come from the trenches of actually having to get things done.Bet-David doesn't hold on self reflecting on his own failures as part of the education, and, though he celebrates good things he has achieved he does so without this being a self-aggrandizing glory train.If you are going to read one book on planning and strategy this is the one I'd recommend.

Fanatic book. A lot of knowledge and it keeps you focus on the reading. I had some great ideas that will make me move my business in the right direction.

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 out-strategise 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.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 wellOne 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.The book is about the interplay between situational awareness, business strategy and you. From introspection to strategy, the book offers personal storytelling as a frame for discussion of what strategy is a personal perspective; and offers insights on the moves that one should think about.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

So much gems in this book on what to expect as an entrepreneur and having the will to go right to the top by embracing the immense continuous challenges. 15 moves chess master. Solid book.

The title of this book is deceiving in that it massively undersells just how good and how essential a read it is for business owners.I’ve never heard of Patrick Bet-David prior to this and I can’t remember what made me buy this book in the first place, but I’m so glad I did.As a solopreneur (currently), I initially thought it wouldn’t benefit me since it seemed to be aimed at bigger companies. I was wrong.There are so many great business lessons and principles here to take your business from whatever stage you’re currently at to where you want to be.It’s not very often these days that I find a book worth reading cover to cover. This was one of them.

It works

I discovered Patrick in Lewis Howes’s video. I was super impressed by his mindset and the confidence that emitted from him while he was talking. I bought his book right after finishing that video and have been reading this book and watching videos from his YT channel since then every day.In this book, Patrick reasons with logic which you can understand easily and provides practical strategies which you can apply immediately to your daily work.I haven’t finished reading but I have already put some of his methods into practice, e.g how to process issue. There was a business report I wanted to make and I applied what I learnt from Patrick to my work, the next day when I delivered my thoughts to the team, not only I felt good about what I said but also my team felt they got value from what I said.I highly recommend anyone, whether you are entrepreneurs or just a 9-5 employees, if you want to make advancements in your business or career, this book will change your life!

Its was ok not as I expected