Henry Tam Case Study Solution

Background:
Within a short span of time, seven diverse team members assemble to write a business plan for a new company and struggle to define their roles and make decisions together, and resolve conflict. Henry Tam, a second-year Harvard MBA student, who joins an aspiring start-up company and a fellow classmate to enter the school's business plan contest. The founders of the company are two internationally accomplished musicians and a 1987 Harvard MBA, all Russian, who are trying to create, produce, and sell a unique computer-based music game. Conflict builds between them as the team generates a range of ideas about how to market their product, but has trouble agreeing on which ideas to pursue. Henry Tam wrestles with how to fix the problems
In this case we see how Henry Tam and other Russian founders of the MGI came together I one after the other meeting. Each one of them had experience in one or the other skill. But somehow all the members wer different from each other, Sasha was very unfocussed and was always jumping from one idea to the other, whereas Dan was a concerned person. Dana worried about the team members limited experience and their need for leadership. Dana, Shasha and Henry were very hard working and had the right attitude towards work but they wanted a person who could show the right way to go or the direction to take. In the team building process the three of them included Dav Clark an MIT graduate with a software development experience who will work with MGI on entry for MIT’S business plan contest. As it is quite evident from the case that the team was a potent mix of all the required talent. Team building is a collaborative way to gather and analyze data to improve teamwork. This is what Henry Tam was trying to do as the meetings had become too long and unmanageable and also they were not able to accomplish anything. In a team there is a team battler, a friendly helper and an objective thinker. Henry Tam here in this case
Here we see team cohesiveness lacking as there were differences amongst the team members. Sasha and Roman had personality conflicts which hampered the team dyanamics. Here a concept of distributed leadership comes who shares responsibility among members for meeting team task and maintenance needs. There were repeatative meetings in this case but no fruitful results came out till the end as only focus was given to the business plans that to on the weekends when there were lot many other things to do. Leadership is the process of influencing others and the process of facilitating individual and collective effort to accomplish shared objectives. Here we see that Henry was not able to influence others and although he observed what was going wrong in the group he was unable to point that out. Also Sasha and Dana had animosity between them which is quite evident from the case. Sasha and Dana had negative chemistry also Sasha had problems with Igor, but they did not have hard feelings for each other as they were friends for almost 20 years now. There was a total lack of leadership in this team as the team was full of talent but was not being propelled in the right