and the next day. My name is Roger Martin and I spend much of my life thinking about thinking, thinking about how people think and can they do that in a way that's more productive for them. And one of the things I did in the fall of 2022 is with a smart friend named Martin Reeves wrote an article in HBR called Strategy in a Hyperpolitical World. It came out in the November, December 2022 HBR. On April 1st, 2023, four months later, Dylan Mulvaney, who's the transgender TikTok influencer, did a paid commercial for a for Bud Light. And in the wake of that, within a month, Bud Light sales, remember, the number one selling beer in America, 35% market share, had fallen by 25% and it stayed low ever since. The greatest kind of destruction of a, greatest and fastest destruction of a number one brand that the world has. has ever seen. And so it sort of begs the question, kind of, what was going on there and how can a company think in a way that would help it avoid that? And my way of thinking comes from a metaphor, right, which is that of fault lines, right? So across the Earth's surface in various places, there are fault lines underneath the Earth. They're not a problem until sometimes they shift and become fissures. And when that happens, as with in 1989, the San Francisco to Oakland Bay Bridge, one of the longest and most heavily traveled bridges in America, was actually torn apart by a, an earthquake. So that a fault line underneath it that nobody knew existed. It wasn't the San Andreas fault, which everybody knows about. That one is famous. This was the one that, the Loma Prieta fault that nobody had ever heard of. That fault essentially opened up and created 63 deaths, untold damage, and one of the, one of the, San Francisco's important computer routes to be out of action for a long period of time. That's in some sense. That's in some sense what happened to Bud Light, right? The, the Dylan Mulvaney commercial Instagram post, that's all it was. One Instagram post caused a fault line between the Bud Light drinkers who, who may sort of say, I don't, you know, I don't care about, about whether Bud Light is supporting a transgender. To some who said, no, I, I am, I am, for one reason or another, offended by that. So that fault line that was hidden, right, became a fissure. And I think it's a warning to companies that they have to make sure they don't think about their market as homogenous. Well, if they're drinking Bud Light, they're kind of all similar enough. No, there are, there are differences in, in, in those, those, those, those various, those various, uh, consumers. And you've got to ask, what might open up a fissure? Now, am I saying, well, you shouldn't, you know, support, trans, uh, gender, uh, influencers? No, no, no, no. What I'm, uh, saying is, you need to understand your marketplace and, and what you're trying to serve more broadly. And if you want to serve a broad marketplace, and this would be my message to any company in the modern hyperpolitical world, the broader your marketplace, right, the more fault lines you're going to get. If you're trying to serve, if you're trying to serve 35% of beer drinkers, you're going to have a variety of folks with a variety of, of attitudes and, and sentiments. And so if you think that in the modern world where everybody sees everything, right, you can't speak to one segment and say, oh, the other segment isn't going to hear this. You have to think of, as if you're speaking to everyone and asking the question, are you opening a fault line or not? And if you don't ask that question, you will do it accidentally. Was Bud Light trying to do this? I mean, after the fact, they sort of said, well, this was inevitable. It's going to happen. No, no. Losing 25% of your market share in, in one month is not, uh, inevitable. It was something caused by not thinking about its entire market. What were the fault lines and how to, how to make sure that you respect everybody in that marketplace so as to not, uh, uh, create that kind of, uh, uh, a disaster. And that is what you have to think about for strategy in a hyper political world.