Our series of book recommendations to empower talent and fuel brands.

Why Perpetual recommends it
Patrick Bet-David’s Your Next Five Moves takes a chess metaphor and applies it directly to business strategy, arguing that the leaders who consistently win aren’t the ones reacting to the present move, they’re the ones already thinking several moves ahead about where a decision leads. Bet-David draws heavily on his own entrepreneurial experience building and scaling multiple companies.
The book moves through practical territory including self-assessment of your own leadership style, building genuine systems and processes rather than relying on personal heroics, and thinking several steps ahead about competitors, talent and market shifts rather than only planning the next single move.
Bet-David is particularly direct about the discomfort of long-range strategic thinking, most leaders default to reacting to the current crisis because it’s genuinely easier than the harder work of mapping five moves ahead, even though it’s the five-moves-ahead thinking that actually determines who wins over time.
We find this a useful, energetic companion to more academic strategy books, since it pushes leaders toward the discipline of anticipating consequences rather than only reacting to the present situation.
- Strategic thinkers plan several moves ahead rather than reacting to the current one
- Systems and processes matter more for sustained growth than individual heroics
- Reacting to the current crisis is easier but less valuable than long-range thinking
- Anticipating competitor and market moves is a discipline, not a natural instinct
A practical exercise is mapping out what happens after your next major decision, not just the immediate result, but the two or three moves your competitors or market are likely to make in response.
We give this book three out of five stars.