Henry Tam And Mgi Team

In Henry Tam and the MGI team, a group of extremely diverse and talented individuals came together to create a business plan for a unique and creative product to compete in the annual HBS business plan contest. This group consisted of two famous Russian composers, a seasoned businessman, and a group of students from various majors including the HBS MBA student Henry Tam. Unfortunately, this mixture of extreme diversity and viewpoints among team members created a fractious team environment that is further fueled by the group’s lack of team processes, leadership, and definitive role assignment. As time runs out for this competition, personal conflicts and group indecisions are pushing the project towards eminent failure. From the start, Henry Tam could have minimized the effect of this issue had he pushed his team for more structured team processes, clear defined leadership, individualized task assignments, and appropriate role assignment according to each member’s skill set. Nevertheless, Henry still can salvage this business plan by start becoming the facilitator to organize this team and setup more effective processes to better utilize the team’s diverse skill sets and converge on the ultimate goal.

Teams can be truly remarkable or terribly dysfunctional1, cannot be better said for Henry and the MGI team, but unfortunately in their current state, it’s remarkable how a capable and diverse team became so dysfunctional because of their diversity is unregulated by good team processes due to initial poor planning. Diversity is not a bad thing for teams, in fact, it is said to be good for creative and divergent activities[2], but without good organization and planning the eventual convergence of ideas for that single goal cannot be achieved and a team get stuck in a perpetual limbo. For MGI, this all started with how MGI performed their new team member selection. The initial MGI team failed to gain commercial success due to what they perceived as lack of business skilled help for Sasha, the HBS graduated business lead, so the MGI team decided to draft new members from local schools including the prestigious HBS school. However, MGI team never properly decided among themselves the skill sets they seek, the personalities that be a proper fit, the roles the new hire will fulfill, nor the tasks that shall be accomplished by new member. Sasha’s email sent to HBS student mailing only promoted the company instead of actually describing the role and expectations of the position. To be exact, the position in the email is characterized by the open ended statement: “We are now looking for help with general management, sales and marketing for Children edutainment market.” It seems the goal of the offer is to make MGI attractive to their targeted school and not really seeking out a member based on any set criteria. However, from its past history, it appears MGI team definitely has a few business management positions to fill, but MGI team failed to diagnose what they needed and what type of team member is considered a proper fit. Sasha, a man with poor interpersonal skill, did not consider if he really desired a teammate or just a subordinate, given his later reaction to the HBS students, he probably should have preferred the establishing a manager-led working group2. However, Henry was hired because Igor liked him as a person and it is uncertain if the MGI team even consulted among themselves before Henry was added to the team as seemingly a full-fledged team member. Dana, the other HBS graduated student was signed on for primarily for her ethnic background being close to Ukraine, home of the composers. In fact, even the consideration for Dana’s investment banking experience was an afterthought by Sasha and never did Sasha consider why an investment banker would be a necessary fit for this team given its current challenges and tasks. MGI Team Appears to be operating under the mentality; the more the better, larger the team the better which is a common team formation fallacy according to [2]. However, First step instead should be to analyze whether a team is appropriate for the work at hand, while MGI’s mentality is avoiding analyzing the root cause of their failure to succeed, but try to get as many talented individual signed on as possible and see where the team takes them .

From the beginning, the initial MGI team itself also acted without a definitive team leader in their trio where Igor appeared as the overall product lead, Roman the creative composer with good music connections, and Sasha the business manager who’s personality is already resented by Roman. Sadly, the symptoms of this disorganization become exacerbated in the larger team context. From the start, Henry and Dana were not told what their roles and goals were and who the leaders are. Instead, they were expected to start writing a business plan and conduct cold calling of applicable alumni without any expectation or attainable goals. This failure to conduct the important process analysis for task complexity, task interdependence, and task objectives1 while explaining the details to integrate the new members, created resistance and confusion among the new members and eventually pushed Henry and Dana to decide for themselves what their tasks and roles should be. To worsen the matter, new team members Alex and Dav were soon brought on without consulting the new HBS team members. Again, Alex and Dav’s role and task assignments were also left undefined to the team and to themselves; just more bodies to fill the team with talent. So assumedly, Alex self-appointed himself as an industry consultant based on his background while Dav just saw himself as the tech guy who somehow wounded up being dragged into this business plan meeting. This team of talented individuals with unassigned roles and tasks went about their own strategies to bring about their common goal of a successful business plan. In addition, the lack of clear team leadership translated to lack of planning for the team tasks and meeting objectives, so every team meeting evolved into uncontrolled brain storm sessions, with constant divergence and interruptions due to personal conflicts, and never leading to any productive outcome. They needed a clear team task, one that requires multiple people to work together to achieve a collective outcome1, but the creative personalities of the group did not work together and half the team jumped all over the place with ideas while the more pragmatic side of the team got frustrated. Henry and Dana decided to form their own pact and defined their own roles in this undefined team structure, Sasha did not accept their roles and saw Henry and Dana as вЂ?interns’ while Henry and Dana saw themselves as “leaders and facilitators in shaping