Henry Tam and the Mgi Team

Henry Tam and the MGI Team

MGMT 868 – Case Study #2

Professor Gemma George

Diana Vazquez

University of Redlands

Table of Contents

Introduction        3

Analysis        3

Recommendations        5

Conclusion        5

References        7

Henry Tam and the MGI team

Introduction

This case study encompassed a startup company Music Games International (MGI), founded by three immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Alexander (Sash) Gimpelson, Igor Tkachenko, and Roman Yakub.  As the founders desired to grow their music game company, they realized they needed a business plan to do so.  In order to enlist assistance with the development of a business plan, MGI entered the Harbor Business School (HBS) business plan contest.  Henry Tam, a HBS senior, and classmate Dana Soiman, took on the challenge, but soon would face conflict among team members, lack of direction, and a lack of defined roles and responsibilities hindering the formulation of a business plan.

Analysis

The MGI team was not lacking talent, Sash brought to the team his financial back ground, he was the organizer, the manager, he ran the business side of the team, Igor and Roman brought the musical side or the creative side to the team.  With the addition of Henry and Dana’s business skills, the team had the components to put together a business plan.  

A business plan is a design of the policies and strategies of an organization.  However, infighting between the founders, Roman and Sasha in particular, and differing visions between Igor and Sasha as to the roles of Henry and Dana lead to a lack of clarity as to the roles and expectations and the future of the two HBS students.  For instance, Igor’s expectations for Henry and Dana’s involvement with MGI was to help develop the vision, direction, as well as the strategy, while Sasha’s expectations ended with the business contest.  It was clear from the first meeting that the team was missing a leader as Dana stated “no one on the team knew the right way to go, or how to decide what direction to take.”  The first meeting also brought an awareness to the animosity that was developing between Sasha and Dana.  It also became evident as Henry stated “they needed a plan of action to get them from utter chaos to legitimate company of prospects.”

With the second meeting, Roman recalled “Sasha and Dana had negative chemistry.”  The second meeting also introduced Alex Sartakov to the team.  Alex’s impression of the team meeting was “very unorganized brainstorming… There was no structure… ideas were coming from every direction.” Henry and Dana decided they would have to take the lead and come up with a plan as they needed to do more than brainstorming at their meetings.  

Sasha introduced another new team member at the third meeting, Dav Clark, an MIT student.  Sasha invited Dav to join the team in order to enter into the MIT business plan competition in parallel with the HBS competition.  Sasha did not include Henry or Dana in discussions with or about Dav joining the team, he just did it.  This action by Sasha made Henry ask “what were Sasha’s motivations?”