Henry Tam – Mgi Case Analysis

Henry Tam – MGI Case Analysis

Experiencing a time crunch after weeks of wasted opportunity, the MGI team is attempting to tackle a business plan for two competitions. Despite having a breadth and depth of talent, spanning software to music to strategy, their complementary skills somehow make a team that fails to be greater than a sum of its parts. GRIP, a model handy for “troubleshooting any task or project that had jumped the tracks”, asks a series of questions that helps identify issues: Goal clarity (the understanding of ‘what’, ‘why’, and agreement on purpose), Role clarity (leadership, responsibilities, and accountability), Interactions (voices heard, styles accepted, behavorial norms, and respect), and Processes (procedures and standards, coordinated efforts, feedback)1. MGI has been provably deficient in the GRI aspects and the communication aspects of the P aspect as well. Without proper direction from above, MGI lacked team discipline and a way to confront and resolve intra-team relationships, which stymied their attempts to release a minimum viable product; fortunately, for Henry Tam, this leadership vacuum also created opportunity that, if seized, would allow him to establish practices that would provide direction, roles, and productive processes.

The most obvious issue of MGI’s team was its lack of goal clarity, exhibited by their inability to agree upon common team goals, which led to team segregation and long, meaningless meetings. Unable to move past the determination of the target market, education or entertainment, the team found it locked into factions that endorsed different viewpoints. Further compounding the issue was the founders’ passion about pursuing “all possible avenues”2 for the marketing of their music game, making a consensus difficult. While the team perceived the brainstorming sessions to be fun and productive initially, Henry quickly discovered that their team’s purpose was too fluid, and that “whenever [he] seemed to be getting close, one of the others would say ‘- no, let’s change it’”; even after three meetings, he observed, “after all our discussions, each person had a different vision”2. The team failed to achieve interpersonal cohesion by having misaligned beliefs and values. Fundamentally, however, the team’s inability to move to the implementation stage was due to the lack of a mechanism to bypass the failed consensuses. Unlike MGI, healthy teams tend to use a two-step process called ‘consensus with qualification’ where in the case of a failed consensus the leader or senior manager assumes a decision-making role guided by the team’s input3. If MGI had established a leader, they could have decided upon a common vision for all team members to focus their collective and individual efforts. Simply put, the absence of a leader led to MGI’s team’s inability to set a common goal, leading to team confusion and inaction. None of the founders had seniority or much power over the others and the HBS students were unsure of their role in the company, which led to the founders and team members all having different perceptions on who was the leader of the group: Dana aptly summarized the situation with “whoever had the most energy at the time provided leadership”2.