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Henry Tam and the Mgi Team

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Henry Tam is a student looking for a challenge and jumps right into one when he decides to join with the MGI (Music Games International) ownership as part of a school competition (The HBS Business Plan Contest). There are seven members in the team comprised of the three founders of MGI– Igor Tkachenko, Alexandra (Sasha) Gimpelson and Roman Yukab, Henry Tam Jr. and Dana Soiman of HBS MBA class students, Dav Clark from MIT and Alex Jan Sartakov from Boston Berklee College. The team had little success thus far working together having experienced conflicts and tensions.

But there are several issues in the team. The problems in the team are:
1. They did not divide the task into sub tasks.
2. There seemed to be a main group and subgroups with no integration.
3. No team leader was officially appointed or nobody was empowered to define the role structure, the decision-making process and assessing team performance.
4. They did not set the norms and values and did not spend time developing a good working culture from the start.

Actually the team demonstrated some key strength. The team is consisting of multi talented team composition. The founders' commonality in ethnic background, close friendship and shared passion on their product was great and there was complementary skill sets contributing from the various team members and their shared commitment to the business.

However, there is issue for the personality of the MGI team founders. They had a history of not getting along with outsiders very well as indicated in the case. Hence when evaluating if the team's differences was an asset or liability. We concluded that this team was a liability as they had not met the objectives, forgone the socio-emotional needs of the team and lacked signs of an effective

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