Henry Tam Case Study

Henry Tam Case Study

Group Assignment # 3

Liyin Zhang

Jaspal Mahal

Jazmyn Diaz

Todd Roy

University of Redlands – School of Business

In partial fulfillment of the requirement of MGMT631

Instructor: Dr. Gemma George

May 22nd, 2017

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION                                                                                1

ANALYSIS                                                                                        2

RECOMMENDATIONS                                                                        3

CONCLUSION                                                                                4

REFERENCES                                                                                5

Introduction:

        The MGI Harvard Business Plan group found itself, up against the wall, facing a rapidly approaching three-week deadline with nothing but a conflicted and multidirectional list of ideas. The team was a formulation of  MGI’s three founders who are immigrants from the former Soviet Union: Igor Tkachenko, Sasha Gimpelson, and Roman Yukab. To help with the formation of a much needed business plan, the team had recruited Harvard Business School (HBS) MBA class students Henry Tam and Dana Soiman to the group. The group also had latecomers: Dav Clark from MIT and Alex Jan Sartakov from Boston Berklee College. The group clearly had a talented and very capable membership but needed to complete its group formation, a task made difficult without strong leadership (Polzer, Vargas, & Anger, 2003). The group formulation process had not moved beyond storming and therefore nothing except conflicting ideas and membership frictions had been produced (Ivancecich, Konopaske, & Matteson, 2014). Henry as a leader could assume the role of identifying the team groups by talent and stated goals. Henry must have the absolute task of fairly and accurately assigning deliverables to appropriate team groups and members. As it was currently, Henry and Dana were carrying the brunt of the load and appropriate tasks to develop the HBS had not yet been codified. From the very start, the team was rendered dysfunctional and could not move into the normalization phase hampering any ability to execute. Our analysis section will further detail challenges brought out in this section.