Henry Tam and the MGI Team

Submitted By:

Group-CMaitrik Shah (2010113)Meenu Mynam (2010118)Neha Dua (2010132)Neeraj Thakur (2010136)Nishith Agrawal (2010139)Piyush Ranjan (2010148)Pratyush Singh (2010150)

Introduction

Henry Tam was enrolled in the MBA program at Harvard Business School (HBS) in the class of 2002. The entire batch was feeling the pain of worst job market in over a decade. This hit caused a lot of apprehension on campus and Henry was no exception to it. In order to go beyond the standard curriculum and be sure of his capabilities, Henry entered the School’s annual business plan contest. This contest was started in 1996 as a vehicle to educate and prepare students for future entrepreneurship opportunities, also was a major campus event students looked forward to.

The teams were not only made up of HBS students but also their colleagues and friends from outside. The obligation in forming the team was to include at least 1 HBS student.

HENRY AND MUSIC GAMES INTERNATIONAL

Henry did not have a great idea for a new business so he checked for the teams seeking team members on the bulletin board of the school. He narrowed his options down to two plans of which he finally chose Music Games International which was a small start up co-founded by Alexander (Sasha) Gimpelson, Igor Tkachenko and Roman Yakub, all immigrants to the United States from the former Soviet Union. Igor was an accomplished musician and composer who got along with Roman, a fellow composer and a long time friend of his, Sasha, an HBS graduate (MBA ’87).

The co-founders got together with an idea to form a company that would produce original music and sound effects for Web sites due to the height of the dot-com boom. The company had a promising start but due to the internet bubble burst it didn’t work out but the trio came up with an idea of producing interactive music-based games. Also, they had an idea for a new kind of puzzle using layers of different instruments for which they had an opportunity for a patent too. The first commercial product, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker: The music game, a CD-ROM for young children. The game was a critical success but a commercial failure. The product was a commercial failure since the company lacked resources and experience to effectively market and distributes the product. Sasha, the only business person was overburdened with a lot of responsibilities. The founders had their differences and similarities which influenced their behaviors.

Team formation:

MGI selected Henry and Dana from HBS to enter the business plan contest. According to Igor, Dana interested him partially because she was Romanian, and also because she wanted to work with kids. Dana was also a second year MBA student at HBS. Sasha agreed because of her back ground in investment banking, and thought that she would be the right fit for the team. Sasha pushed Dana to include Henry as well because of his experience in business development and media. Both Henry and Dana were unclear about the MGS products so they came up with 25 “due diligence questions” to ask Igor and Sasha at the first team meeting.

The First Meeting

The first official meeting was in the beginning of February 2002. Henry, Dana, Igor and Sasha sat around a small conference table. Henry noticed that Sasha was very unfocused and jumped from one idea to another. There were no roles defined at first according to Dana and she felt that there was a lot of for her and Henry to contribute. Sasha saw Dana and Henry as business plans writers whereas Igor looked up to them for vision and strategy.

Later on, Igor noticed conflicts between Sasha and Dana.

To Henry, it seemed that the group had a confrontational stance between two apparent sub groups.

The Second Meeting

The second meeting happened after a week and Roman met Henry and Dana for the first time.

There was a new member, Alex Sartakov from Berklee College of Music who was invited by Igor and Sasha. He was really impressed by the Nutcracker game and agreed to help MGI with new ideas. According to Alex, the session was very much an unorganized brainstorming session with ideas coming in from every direction and had no structure. He didn’t speak until asked for an opinion.

In the second meeting, there was a debate between team members as to launch the product for teenagers or for kids. The tension between Dana and Sasha grew and none of them would agree to what other would say. Both of them had a different perspective of analyzing the situation which would be the cause of the argument. This discord and unorganized way of discussing the plan made Henry realize that they need to think upon a new strategy.

At the end of the meeting, Henry, Dana and Sasha were asked to get present their ideas along for the next meeting.

The Third Meeting

There was another addition in the third meeting, Dav Clark, an MIT graduate student with software development experience who was brought in by Sasha. Henry and Dana were troubled by the new addition. Henry thought that the new entry would even build up more troubles and Dana was under the impression that Sasha brought him under the ploy of entering the similar kind of business plan competition at MIT as at HBS. On top of all this, none of them were consulted for Dav’s joining the team. As the deadline date approaching, Dav’s initiation had been to pull an all-nighter to get Sasha and Igor’s rough draft of an executive summary for submission. Dav believed that MGI needed some technological improvements too.

Even after all these frustrated meeting Henry was even more determined to get things streamlined. He was now occupied with the challenge of working with such a complex team and pondered on what he could do to help the team work.

Analysis

The team at MGI is a right blend of creativity and experience. It is a self-managed team. Though there are many instances in the case where they could not reach a consensus on any issue it can be noticed that the team was highly enthusiastic and was eager to develop their venture.

Individuals when matched with organizations/ventures that value creative ideas work more efficiently. Igor and Roman were musicians and internationally acclaimed composers and their interest and creativity is reflected in the product that they created. They invented a patent pending software platform which was lauded by many. ‘Creativity’ happens to be the major strength of the MGI team. Though Sasha says that he is poor at his interpersonal skills he has strong ideas which could benefit the team if he focuses on one issue at a time.

Most importantly for any team to succeed there should be a strong bond between the team members. This is visible between the Igor, Roman and Sasha. Sometimes such diversity and cohesiveness helps the new entrants to bring out the best in them and this is exhibited by Henry who has already developed a strong bond with the team.

MGI was just a group of 3 people and they did not have stringent policies or processes in place. This usually happens with organizations/venture which lack a large work force. In such cases the mutual understanding between the partners’ drives the business. As they try to expand and recruit new members they should introduce policies and processes so that the new entrants understand their responsibilities and also the vision of the organization. This is the reason why there are differences in the team at MIG after the students of HBS and MIT came on board.

Their roles were not clear and there was always a new member joining the team in every time they called had a meeting.

Clearly defined roles and a concrete, well-structured plan for the future could help MIG in making it through the contest.

The differences between the team members are actually an asset to the team. The blend of creativity and business has helped them to come with a product which would definitely capture a chunk of the market if it is aimed at the right set of people. The debated that they regularly have if channelized into a single direction could result in financial gain to the company. There were people like Sasha, who was strong in his opinions, and Dana, with her methodical approach, often ending up negating each other’s statements. Henry on the other hand was calm and soft-spoken facilitating the discussions and thinking of ways to convince the group and work towards the preparation for the contest.

The disadvantage in this case is that the team consists of both the Americans and the Russians. The Americans are from a culture with low uncertainty avoidance and are ready to tread into unknown waters looking for an opportunity to change for better while on the other hand the Russians are high on uncertainty avoidance. This could be one reason why they are unable to zero-in on a sector (education or teen) to target.

Solution

The first problem that Henry needs to address is role definition. The roles of the individuals should be demarcated though suggestions on every front should be welcome. This can be done through discussing this issue and mutually agreeing on best suited role for each. This in turn would solve the conflicts when discussions encroach overlapped areas.

This in a way calls for organizing the team. Cultural diversities clearly seemed to be causing problems in the team. So they should work together to eliminate it.All these things should be grouped together under a leadership. Henry,clearly is a good leader as Alex and Dana has also agreed in the case. Sasha was too aggressive to be a leader although he was leading MGI team on various ends. Also as Henry was a business students he has an edge over other music background guys. This team under a leader would be properly guided on every front.

Sasha and Dana seem to have a problem.For now Henry should try to keep them as distant as possible because the deadline for the plan submission has approached. For this Henry should try to assign them roles which do not overlap .

Managerial Learnings As we have seen in the case, the conflict arises between Dana and Sasha as there was no

designated leader who can direct them towards a consensus. Hence while working in a big group, we should have a designated leader who can guide us in such situations.

Lack of transparency in the team creates insecurity and confusion in the mind of the teammates, hence we should make sure that things are communicated and shared with each and every group mate.

Apart from the deadline scheduled by the client, the team mates should internally fix a deadline for themselves; this will ensure the timely completion of any task assigned.

Team mates should show confidence in each other and let the expert of any field work as they want to. Team mates should suggest what can be beneficial and what cannot, but the end decision should always be with the expert.