Henry Tam and Mgi Team

In Henry Tam and the MGI team, a group of extremely diverse and talented individuals came together to create a business plan for a unique and creative product to compete in the annual HBS business plan contest. This group consisted of two famous Russian composers, a seasoned businessman, and a group of students from various majors including the HBS MBA student Henry Tam. Unfortunately, this mixture of extreme diversity and viewpoints among team members created a fractious team environment that is further fueled by the group’s lack of team processes, leadership, and definitive role assignment. As time runs out for this competition, personal conflicts and group indecisions are pushing the project towards eminent failure. From the start, Henry Tam could have minimized the effect of this issue had he pushed his team for more structured team processes, clear defined leadership, individualized task assignments, and appropriate role assignment according to each member’s skill set. Nevertheless, Henry still can salvage this business plan by start becoming the facilitator to organize this team and setup more effective processes to better utilize the team’s diverse skill sets and converge on the ultimate goal.
Teams can be truly remarkable or terribly dysfunctional1, cannot be better said for Henry and the MGI team, but unfortunately in their current state, it’s remarkable how a capable and diverse team became so dysfunctional because of their diversity is unregulated by good team processes due to initial poor planning. Diversity is not a bad thing for teams, in fact, it is said to be good for creative and divergent activities[2], but without good organization and planning the eventual convergence of ideas for that single goal cannot be achieved and a team get stuck in a perpetual limbo. For MGI, this all started with how MGI performed their new team member selection. The initial MGI team failed to gain commercial success due to what they perceived as lack of