Guy

@RogerLMartin This is the most epic giving tree of all time!

This week features Chapter Nine of the Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights All-Stars Book Club: The Motivation for Strategy. rogerlmartin.substack.com/p/ptwpi-all-st… This piece provides practical advice on the first box of the Strategy Choice Cascade – Winning Aspiration. It argues that one statement of overall intention is better than multiple purpose, mission, and vision statements. It also argues that it needs to feature an intention to win and to be motivational to customers and employees. I hope this helps cut through the clutter of purpose, mission and vision. Hope you enjoy!

@YieldForceOne @graphprotocol @marcandu @MakerDAO How much do they make in salary?

@graphprotocol @marcandu @MakerDAO Another salary. Look out below $GRT.

Governance Update 🗳️ The Graph Foundation welcomes Marc-André Dumas (@marcandu) as the newest member of The Graph Council. Marc-André brings deep technical expertise and a decade of building mission-critical infrastructure, from Senior Integration Specialist at @MakerDAO, to Technical Lead at @ChronicleLabs, to Founder of @ellipfra, a web3 and blockchain infrastructure company. His perspective will strengthen governance, treasury stewardship, and long-term ecosystem growth. forum.thegraph.com/t/introducing-…

This week features Chapter Seven of the Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights All-Stars Book Club: Strategic Choice Chartering. rogerlmartin.substack.com/p/ptwpi-all-st… This is about what I believe to be one of the very most important leadership tools. Skillfully wielding it is critical to great leadership. In this piece, I focus on how to actually make happen what you wish to happen in your organization. The modern notion of ‘execution’ isn’t helpful – it is a logically bankrupt concept. A different approach is to see it as leadership’s job – at every level of the organization – to structure choices below so that a leader’s direct reports have the best chance of doing their job and doing it well. Great Strategic Choice Chartering turns strategy into desired outcomes and, at the same time, builds organizational human capital. Try it. I guarantee you will experience the benefits. Hope you enjoy!

The question institutions keep asking: how do you get from raw blockchain data to something audit-ready and production-grade? The Graph's answer at DAS this year: Subgraphs for indexed APIs, Substreams for high-performance pipelines, Amp for enterprise-grade SQL access across chains. Find The Graph team at the booth today!

🚨 This connection isn’t getting anywhere near the attention it deserves. Her disappearance is strange: here one moment, gone the next. No warning. No trace. The general? He had roughly one hour—just 60 minutes—from when he was last seen to vanish off the face of the Earth.

@RogerLMartin Love this one!

After a week off, I am returning to the Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights All-Stars Book Club with Chapter Four. This Chapter features Decoding the Strategy Choice Cascade. rogerlmartin.substack.com/p/ptwpi-all-st… In the original article, I answered a variety of reader questions on the Strategy Choice Cascade. These included questions about why there are five boxes, why the boxes are in the order they are, and why does it have the cascade shape? All good questions – which I addressed at the time and reflect on in this piece. Hope you enjoy!

Welcome to Chapter Two of the Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) book club. I am reprising the 37 pieces that were ranked highest by readers – and they make up one books-worth of content. The second is Why Planning over Strategy? rogerlmartin.substack.com/p/ptwpi-all-st… In this one, I explain why planning – even when it is called ‘strategic’ – dominates over strategy. It is a self-sealing system that dominates business education, executive management and ‘strategy’ consulting firms. It produces and puts technocrats more in charge than strategists. I provide my commentary on the original piece and then the link to it. I hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to Chapter One of the Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) book club. I am reprising the 37 pieces that were ranked highest by readers – and they make up one books-worth of content. The first is Michael Porter’s Three Great Strategy Contributions. He saved the strategy academy, he bolstered strategy over planning, and he provoked the conversion of strategy and marketing. I provide my commentary on the piece and then the link to it. I hope you enjoy it. open.substack.com/pub/rogerlmart…

The agent economy has a cold start problem. Agents can execute smart contracts, but they can't: ➡️Verify each other's reputation across chains ➡️Pay for data without getting wrecked by gas fees ➡️Access structured blockchain data in milliseconds How the Graph is solving these problems ⬇️ ERC-8004 solves the trust problem. It's an onchain registry system that gives agents verifiable identity, reputation scores, and validation records. Think of it as a passport that proves an agent is legitimate and tracks its behavior across chains. x402 solves the payment problem. It enables AI agents to make micropayments instantly, paying fractions of a cent for an API call or database query without human intervention. No forms, no subscriptions. Just low-friction machine-to-machine commerce. But both standards need data infrastructure to work. That's where The Graph comes in. The Graph publishes dedicated ERC-8004 Subgraphs across 8 chains, letting agents instantly check reputation and validation registries. GraphTally enables x402 micropayments without gas fee bottlenecks. The result? Agents can now verify identity, pay for data, and execute tasks across multiple chains autonomously.

@RogerLMartin What an era! So grateful for all the articles. I’ve been w/ you since the start. I’ve read/re-read so much of what you generously shared on Medium. It had a deep impact on my career/approach to strategy. Felt like real-time mentorship with a hero. See you on Substack - thank you!

It is the end of an era. I have wrapped up five years of my Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) series and heading off in a new direction. I have completed my transition from Medium to Substack. And I am going to spend the next year doing a book club-style series in which I mix discussions of the most popular PTW/PI from the past five years with new pieces. Please join me on this new journey. rogerlmartin.substack.com/p/the-end-of-a…

@RogerLMartin An article I would love to read is an in-depth treatment of WTP: all the vectors, and in the order/sequence you'd follow, for an effective WTP analysis. It seems like such a wide range of decisions, can feel a bit unbounded (a place to get stuck)... more considerations than HTW.

Today I provide a summary of Year V of the Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights series. rogerlmartin.substack.com/p/a-fifth-year… As with the first four years, I published one (average) 1800-word piece on strategy every Monday for 52 consecutive weeks – whew! This year featured six co-authored articles – the first time I had done that in the series. It reviewed one book – Peter Drucker’s Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices – which was my 11th in the series. And I gave revisions on the Strategic Choice Structuring Process and my definition of strategy. Do a quick run through of the year and read the ones that jump out at you. Next week, where from here?

@RogerLMartin My AI told me this morning that the WWHTBT question is the "connective tissue" running through your three frameworks: SCSP, SCC, and Strategy Logic Flow. I'm not sold, per se... but I am intrigued by the idea.

The Graph and @chainlink power different layers of the same stack. Chainlink brings offchain data onchain. The Graph makes onchain data accessible. Together = the infrastructure for all types of applications.

Find out how @graphprotocol is future-proofing Web3 dApps before it’s too late with Nick Hansen (@TwentyTwoNode) on the latest episode of The #SmartEconomyPodcast. Listen now ➡️bit.ly/3WDyWth

Just read that Starbucks lost $30B after hiring a McKinsey consultant as CEO. Guy spent his career advising founders how to build companies, but never built one himself. 17 months later, he’s gone. They bring in the Taco Bell CEO… and the market cap jumps $20B overnight. Turns out running a company is harder than advising one.

@RogerLMartin Epic

Just published my latest Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights piece in which I revisit and update my definition of #strategy rogermartin.medium.com/revisiting-my-… Enjoy!

@rickbeato when a video on Bon Iver? Please 🙏🏻

@RogerLMartin Congratulations! I've read every post - and many several times - and look forward to each Monday's post. I've been with you since post #1! Your Medium page has increased my understanding of business/strategy significantly... thanks for sharing all this practical wisdom!

Celebrating 1 Million Reads for the Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights series. rogermartin.medium.com/another-playin… #strategy Enjoy!

@RogerLMartin This was so great. I love the emphasis on the problem statement and the levers of control… fun and helpful, per usual.

I have just posted my latest Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights piece, this one on how I do #strategy rogermartin.medium.com/how-i-do-strat… Enjoy!