a quick case study on Michael Vick the corporation and his dog fighting subsidiary

We spend a lot of time managing change.

We got our Blackberries, IM clients and we Twitter constantly to stay current.

We have RSS feeds out the wazoo, have a wishlist for our business on TIVO and will even occasionally buy a physical magazine or newspaper. We know we have good information.

We are 100% sure we know what’s happening to our business right now.

And therein lies your problem.

In today’s world smart folks don’t try to manage change.

They anticipate it by seeing what’s happening outside there business can effect them.

Let’s strip all the noise away and do a quick case study on Michael Vick the corporation, his dog fighting subsidiary and how not anticipating change really fucked him up.

If you are going to commit a crime it’s important to keep in mind , especially if you’re a public figure, just how high up on the irritating-the-public scale it is.

Public figures caught with weed are unlikely to lose their careers. Players have been accused of crimes even as notorious as rape or murder and still they thrived.

But a few things have converged to make Micheal Vick a pariah.

Let’s be completely honest, if the dog fighting allegations had come out this time last year Vick would be far less trouble. And not because of the lack of a NFL conduct policy.

The NFL conduct policy was a train even the blind could anticipate.

The NBA started the trend with it’s dress code policy. NFL players rap sheets became the talk of sports radio. Plus a new commissioner was coming in and had to make his mark.

That convergence of trends made the NFL conduct policy a given. But Vick assumed, and he would have been right last year and most years before, that his crime would not be considered a major one if he ever got caught. Especially not one that would jeopardize his career.

But other trends were happening which the football-clever Vick, ignored or just missed.

Things have been happening on the edges which are changing the way people look at pets.

It started years ago with the mainstreaming of vegetarians.

Then remember Barbaro, the horse?

The rise of social networks also played a huge role.

If you’re a dog lover you now have the opportunity to know hundreds more. And they pass information. By email, IM and even Twittering. Just look at how busy the Dogster forums are. Or take a look at the amount of dog pictures on Flikr.

It seems pretty obvious that with these things conspiring against you it was not the time to be in the dog fighting business.

But the real tipping point happened in April, before the allegations against Vick came to light. It was the China tainted dog food story.

Suddenly you had millions of pets threatened.

Unfortunately the threat was something pet owners could do nothing about. China? How does some woman in Utah who loves her poodle fight against some unknown exporter in China?

Then came Vick.

Something could be done about him.

Just like Saddam had to pay for the sins of Osama Bin Ladin, Vick is being handled much more severely than others accused of far more heinous crimes.

If the Vick Dog Fighting subsidiary had been paying attention to these trends on the edges his best option would have been obvious.

The best Vick option was to handle it quickly and quietly as possible. Instead, by not anticipating the change on the edges and the effects it would have on his middle (his mainstream football career) he could lose everything.

The same thing happens in business.

Newspapers ignoring the Craigslists and Ebay. The music business ignoring Napster and P2P…

Stop looking at what’s happening to you and start paying attention to what’s happening around you.

Especially on the edges.

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