Mike McCready

Oh Man!!

I’ve thrown myself into the public eye more times than I should have. It probably has something to do with adolescent insecurities.

This habit has brought me a looooooooooooooooong list of painfully embarrassing moments and public failures which play on endless loop in my head. Over the years I’ve accumulated enough humiliating footage for a mini-series and yesterday I added another episode.

Columbia University Professor Leonard Lee asked me to teach the Polyphonic HMI case study to three of his combined MBA marketing classes. I’ve led discussion and debate many times in these kinds of classes at business schools all over and it’s something I’m usually very comfortable doing. I’ve long since gotten over any fear of public speaking and I’m not bad at it frankly. But yesterday, Professor Lee asked if I would teach the entire case study from start to finish.

Nooooo prooooblem!!!

I’ve seen it taught at least a dozen times. He gave me the teachers’ notes, I know the case backwards and forwards. What could go wrong? Hell, why not invite some music industry folks who have expressed interest in the past, right?

Performance coaches talk about a state of mind when your level of confidence and self-assuredness is so high you can command peak performance from yourself. Those are times when you do so well at something you practically have to ask yourself, “was that me?” Other times you’re in a state of mind where you just can’t pull something off. You forget your sister’s name or your own birthday or how to spell the word “the”; or in my case, the world “label”. Five minutes into the case study I was hit with some sort of crazy mind block.

Yes, in front of approximately 200 of the brightest business students this country has I, for the life of me, could not decide if the word label (as in music label) was spelled “label” or “lable” as I was writing it, erasing it and re-writing it on the blackboard – while being filmed for posterity nonetheless. Neither way looked right to me.

OH MY GOD!!!

What the hell was that all about? I must write and read that word a dozen times a day. LITERALLY!

Talk about a crushing moment that shakes one’s self-confidence to the core. How do you recover from something like that? OUCH!!

I plowed through. I had no choice but to move on despite the snickers I was getting. I couldn’t even think of something light to say to break the moment up and disarm the situation. Then, I wrote it wrong AGAIN a bit later on. What the…? My delivery got so dry I ended up being boring. I struggled to teach the case. I should be able to do it very well in my sleep but instead I was putting students to sleep. What a disaster!!

But let me say, independently of whether you can spell or not, teaching a case study (even one you know by heart) is MUCH harder than it looks. No excuses though. I’m going to do it again because I’m NOT going to take that as my final grade!

After class I got on a 6 hour flight to Europe and would have liked to sleep but there was a blaring loud, gut-wrenching film loop playing in my head that had me cringing all the way across the Atlantic.

It really smarts. Ironic, isn’t it?

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