Henry TamSubmitted by MGT 4308

October 26, 2009

Executive Summary

Management Issue:

Henry Tam has joined the MGI team and is willing to use all his business background to help the

company create a successful business plan to be funded and distribute the final product. He has

come across some different issues within the team that need to be resolved before he can

continue. There is the issue of different ideas since they all have different backgrounds. Henry is

not the only person that was brought into the team with business experience; also, he does not

have any musical background that gives him any more credibility with the founders. The

founders are not business people, they are musicians and so they are not very good managers.

Bringing many different points of view to the table is a challenge because they all have different

viewpoints. One of the biggest issues is that they have not selected a leader yet. Sasha continues

to act as the proclaimed leader even though he does not know where he is going. Another big

issue is that they cannot agree on which market to penetrate. Henry is not using all of his

resources to solve this situation.

Action Plan:

Henry needs to analyze the situation deeper in order to formulate a plan. Henry needs to define

the problem, generate alternate solutions, evaluate and select an alternative, and implement and

follow up on the solution. Henry selected MGI as the company he would help with his expertise

in the business field. Some of the founders have seen the value that Henry and Dana bring to the

project so that gives Henry some advantage.

Henry must define the problem thus differentiate fact from opinion since almost everyone

in the team has some kind of musical background so musicians tend to be more

passionate about their product.

There must be alternate solutions generated, not everyone in the group participates and

gives their point of view. This would give the team more ideas to work with and have a

greater variety of ideas.

Evaluate and select an alternative idea, there must be more than just raw data and more of

an analysis.

Implement and follow up on the solution, there must be a time for feedback from

everyone to be able to gain a better solution to the problems that may arise.

Appendix

Analysis:

There seems to be multiple issues in this case. The founders of Music Group International (MGI)

have been working on this project for quite some time but do not have the resources to get the

project up and running. The Harvard Business School holds a contest where they have HBS

students show off their talents and write a business plan. MGI decided to take advantage of the

offer that HBS is putting out there since any one can participate as long as the team included a

second year MBA student, Henry so happened to be looking for a good concept. This seemed a

lot less complicated than it turned out to be. Henry was excited about the project and believed

that he could be a tremendous asset to the team, and that his expertise could be used to the

benefit of the company. However, things began to take a turn when additional team members

entered the team and complicated things. It went from three founders and an initial team

member, to three founders and four team members. The fact that they all had different types of

business backgrounds brought different ideas to the table. There were seven members to the team

in total, three founders, and four other members who joined later. The founders were Sasha, Igor,

and Roman, followed by; members, Henry, Dana, Alexander, and Dav.

Problem:

To start off, even though the founders had worked on the project full time for quite some time,

they had different perspectives and ideas. They had worked on this project and yet they still were

not successful. Igor and Roman had music background as opposed to Sasha who had an MBA

from HBS, more with a managerial background in others fields other than the music industry.

Sasha was more of the decision maker of the group, he held the team together. Henry and Dana

were both HBS students and so they had similar points of view. They were used to raw data and

models used to determine the best course of action and they felt that even though they respected

Sasha’s enthusiasm and dedication to the company, they strongly believed that he did not know

what he was talking about. Sasha was a very strong opinionated person and so it was hard for

him to change his mind once he made up his mind. The others do not take a side since they find

good points on both sides. The other issue is that no one steps up to take a leadership role and

become the leader that the company really needs. There is evident animosity between Dana and

Sasha, and both keep shutting down each other’s ideas. The founders have put in a lot of work in

this project so they are testing the members to see how committed they really are.

Recommendations:

Sasha definitely had the drive and the commitment to lead the team to success. However, he is

not very open to other’s suggestions and that could jeopardize the team’s end-result. Dana’s

animosity with Sasha leads me to believe that Dana lets her feelings get in the way and so she

would not make very good business decisions. Henry seems to have a handle on things but he

needs to analyze the situation and find the problem within the team before anything else is done.

Sasha is used to handle everything on his own but he must accept the idea that now he has others

who are capable of handling things just as well as he would or perhaps even better. The HBS

students are not there as interns who are there to get coffee or make copies. They are there to

assist and consult on their expertise for the benefit of the company. The new members must also

realize that the founders have put in their sweat and tears into this project thus they are very

precise about what they believe the final product should be.