Introduction The Music Games International (Hereafter referred to as “MGI”) team comprised of seven (7) members as stated – The group is extremely diverse comprising of the following, Henry Tam and Dana Soiman were final semester students at Harvard Business School (Hereafter referred to as “HBS”) working on the business plan not just for the competition, and as a professional challenge as soon. For the founders, Sasha Gimpelson was known for his unconventional ideas. Igor Tkachenko, an accomplished musician and Roman Yakub, a composer.
Alex Sartakov -introduced to the group through a mutual friend of Igor and Sasha, he had music background, Dav Clark was a MIT graduate had a software background and was also planning to enter the MGI case for the MIT business plan contest. Question 1 What is your evaluation of the MGI’s team process? What were the roots causes of the team’s process problems? In evaluating the team’s process from the four stages of group development as shown at Exhibit 1 are: Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing.
The forming stage in which the founders of MGI looking for someone who could work on doing general management, sales and marketing for their child edutainment products while at the same time, Henry and Dana, the two HBS MBA class students were looking at a company for them to work for The Harvard Business Plan Contest. At this important stage, the team had to start designing the team structure, appointing team leader, developing individual roles, developing thrust and communication, developing norms, defining problems and strategy and identifying information needed.
However, that was never happened and in fact there was something ‘unusual’ at the forming stage in which one of the co-founders, Roman was missing at the first meeting, while Alex was introduced as one of the team member at the second meeting while Dave at the third meeting subsequently. The forming stage was deemed rather ad-hoc and without planning and some time when new members were inducted ad-hoc without the consent of other members (in this case Henry and Dana), it might cause discord and perceived that new members as rivals and tagged along to enjoy the fruits of their labour.
The first meeting held with Igor and Sasha mostly high lightened about MGI’s problem to market their child edutainment products. In the storming stage, things became more complicated, frustration and confusion aroused as well. Henry described the meeting as confrontational stance between him, Dana and the three Russians. At this stage, members supposed to brainstorm on team’s goals and objectives, mutual roles and responsibilities, interpersonal skills, task, communication and decision systems while in this case, that was not happened.
While Henry and Dana perceived themselves as strategic contributors to MGI, the two co-founders perceived otherwise. Sasha and Igor saw both HBS students as interns/lackey that would help MGI to do the company’s business plan, vision and strategy. The storming stage seemed failed to develop two ways communication between the co-founders and both of the HBS students as no brainstorming took place. What happened was so straight forward instruction in which both Henry and Dana were given task by Sasha to contact HBS’s alumni.
In respect of Sasha’s intention to contact the HBS Alumni to further the business strategy was shocking and stunned as it undermine their integrity. Sasha might be thinking that was the HBS students and Dav taking advantage of the business strategy by joining a business competition and boost their average class of their studies. A norming stage is the stage in which team do detailed planning, develop criteria for completion of goals, build up positive norms and values as well as encourage continued team spirit.
The team could further ironed out each goals and what their want out of the business strategy. Perhaps the team should draft the shareholder agreement or even partnership to allocation shares or interest based on the potential outcome. Nothing is free in the life these days; monetary is usually the driving force and motivation to be inspired. An example of how Facebook became very successful and because of that it leads to various lawsuits when suddenly of the bushes many people claimed input and ideas that created the social portal.
It’s always a wise move to discuss and negotiable potential agreement with sound legal advice. As for the norming stage, it was completely blunder since no detail discussion on goals, norms and values took place and no team spirit developed. The norming stage was filled up with unnecessary argumentation and unhealthy conflict between the co-founders and the HBS students while the other two were sitting on the other side.
Failure in this stage thus led to poor team performance as no team leader who has utmost authority identified, no clear goal as to win the HBS Business Plan Competition or market MGI’s products successfully defined and the status of both Henry and Dana, whether they were business partners or interns/lackeys was also not decided. They team was no different to a ship with no admiral and no direction to go. To be honest once read and analyze the case study, it is obvious that there was no cohesion, not only as a group overall, but even within a splinter teams.
It seems that Roman was disagreeing within the Soviet splinter group and the HBS students disagreeing with Sasha and it was vice-versa. Negative related issue related to low helping behaviour. The HSB students also felt that the brainstorming were far too lengthy and not effective at all. The norms were obviously not defined and agreeable by all team members, no decision-making and different task orientation hence the development of the business plan was too slow.
