Author: Patrick Bet-David
My Rating: 4/5
Summary: A very tactical and practical way to think about becoming a successful entrepreneur.
My Takeaways
Great business leaders think like chess grandmasters.
5 moves is the right amount because it’s the sweet spot for thoughtful strategy with action and thinking too many moves ahead can lead to analysis paralysis.
The 5 Moves
- Master knowing yourself.
- Master the ability to reason
- Master building the right team.
- Master strategy to scale
- Master power plays
MOVE #1: UNDERSTAND YOURSELF
To be the best you can be, you must first know who you want to be, where you wish to go, and what factors should drive your decisions. Bet-David breaks this down into 3 parts:
• Knowing who you want to be (including your deepest desires, core beliefs and values) and start behaving as if you were already that person.
• Knowing where you are now, by being totally honest with yourself on your strengths/weaknesses, what motivates you, and what you truly want (not what you think you should want).
• Knowing your ideal path. Does entrepreneurship really suit you? Or are you better off striking out as an intrapreneur within your company?
MOVE #2: SOLVE PROBLEMS EFFECTIVELY
To achieve success and fulfillment, you must handle thousands of problems and decisions. Hone your problem-solving skills to get better outcomes and pre-empt problems in the future. This requires that you:
• Learn how to process issues rigorously. Bet-David shares the “Investment-Time-Return formula” you can use to optimize your resources, and how to take full responsibility for your desired outcomes.
• Learn to “Solve for X”, i.e. find and address the root causes or underlying issues behind a problem or situation.
MOVE #3: BUILD A WINNING TEAM
No matter how brilliant you are, you can’t do everything alone. Surround yourself with the right people who can address your weaknesses and blind spots, multiply your strengths, and help you and your business to grow.
This move probably warrants a book all by itself. Bet-David addresses several key aspects, including:
• How to hire and retain the right people. This involves attracting the right talents and advisers, having a robust recruitment process, and developing an attractive compensation plan to retain people.
• How to build a winning culture. This involves establishing common values, principles and beliefs, translating them into concrete behaviors in your daily work, building trust, developing a succession plan, encouraging constructive conflict, and tailoring your approach to each team member’s love languages and motivators.
MOVE #4: STRATEGIZE TO SCALE UP
There are several strategic elements that determine if your business will grow, stagnate, or even collapse. To scale up and achieve exponential growth, you must:
• Raise and use capital wisely, to generate both linear and exponential growth.
• Grow your people alongside the company. Demand the best from people, hold them accountable for their own career or life goals, role-model the expected levels of rigor and accountability, and track the key metrics in your business.
MOVE #5: GET GOOD AT POWER PLAYS
Power plays can determine if you emerge a winner or loser. Master your strategic maneuvers to beat established incumbents, frame your story, and leverage social media. This move is about:
• Finding the right levers so you can beat the giants (i.e. the huge, established market leaders in your industry) who have much more resources, experience and capital than you. Bet-David advocates using social media as a key marketing tool to engage your audience, shape your story and influence public opinion.
• Learning to negotiate, sell, and influence. This requires that you do your homework before every major meeting, build strategic partnerships, and progressively develop your negotiation skills and power
Be of value to others, in order to get value from them. (Example. Patrick visited the son in prison of a person he wanted to leverage contacts.)
Don’t be afraid to promote yourself on social media and sell yourself, because nobody else will
Successful people use pain as a motivator
Create a clear picture of future state.
Act consistent with your future truth.
Act like a great company long before you become one.
Know what drives you. Common reasons are advancement, madness (having an enemy) individuality, lifestyle, purpose
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Create a company culture that fosters intraprenuership and creative thinking. (.I.e. Google %20rule)
Blue Ocean Strategy / New category
Don’t try to beat competitors at their strengths since that is a losing game.
Identify the competitive edge
Know how to process issues. Life is always throwing out issues.
People who process info badly play the victim and don’t take responsibility, good processors take responsibility
Deep level processors look be north the surface for the root causes, as opposed to the quick fix.
Going silent during a crisis is the easy choice.
Know your all in risk.
People are curious
Prevent problems before they become big.
Need to develop a system for making decisions and a methodology that will increase the probability of success
5 why’s
Think about how you can benefit others
Have employees think like owners and structure an incentive plan so it’s a win-win for the employee and company
Build a company with principles. (Cites Ray Dalio’s book several times)
Establish a company code
Build a company culture that not only embraces friction, but creates it (with love).
The reason to develop trust is to speed up every element of conducting your business
Figure out indemnification so that you can’t be sued
Document everything
Seek advice from people who know the theory, witness and application
Build processes to scale your business
Build speed into everything you do.
Look for strategies to compress timeframes.
Use data analytics
Stay paranoid