Business Memo (Essay Sample)

BUSINESS MEMO Name: Course Date To: The MGI Team From: Date: Subject: Lack of Unity in the MGI Team Company Background The MGI team consists of seven members: Igor Tkechneko, Alexander (Sasha) Gimpelson, Roman Yakub, Henry Tam, Dana Sioman, Dav Clar, a graduate from MIT, and Alex Sartakov from Berklee Boston College of Music. The MGI Company with its three original co-founders and additional team members is working to help create a business plan for HBI. Henry Tam, a graduate of Harvard Business School, has joined the annual business contest at the Harvard Business School (HBS). Another HBS student, Dana Soiman, has also entered the annual business contest and joined the MGI team. While each member brings different technical skills and experience, the team faces a managerial problem when it comes to creating the business plan. Although the co founders are close knit, they have problems in the beginning of the project with the new members. These certainly give rise to personality danger in the MGI team between the founders and the incumbent members. The MGI team has created software that is geared towards teaching music to children. This software turns any music composition into a game. Despite the enthusiasm of the creators of the software, they are unable to bring the product to the public successfully. Two of the founders are Russians musicians with little or no business experience. This makes it burdensome to relocate all business-related matters to one person. Henry and Dana, business school students, are unable to create a business plan due to team management issues. The business school students with an experience in writing a business plan are trying to create a business plan that will help the MGI Team to become a stable and more functioning business. In addition, Alex and Dav have joined the process to add diversity and dynamics to the MGI team. While diversity is a crucial aspect, the group has made little progress in creating the business plan that is due in three weeks. Henry is certain that the team will not meet the deadline if it functions as before. The case analysis is aimed to ensure that the members of the team can find a competitive leader that can manage their issues and behaviors to achieve productivity and the final goal. The MGI team is ineffective due to subgroup conflicts, which make it impossible to complete the business plan. During the launch in the Mellon Hall on the Harvard Business School campus, it became evident that the team did not have a vision and a strategy to create a business plan. Key Problem The leadership incorporated five stages of development while developing the MGI team process: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. The forming stage was difficult as some of the team members failed to attend all the meetings. This issue made it difficult to form a clear consensus and learn individual differences in a team. For instance, Roman did not attend the first meeting when Dav and Alex were introduced to Sasha. During the storming stage, Dana and Henry see themselves as strategic contributors to the MGI business plan, while Sasha sees them as business plan writers and interns. At this stage, conflicting frustrations and expectations lead to confusion among the members. This is also the reason of Dana and Sasha’s negative chemistry. Moreover, the group had different leaders at different times. The complete inability to cooperate was experienced in the norming stage. The group had not presented its norms and values to achieve their desired goals. Roman disagreed with the Russians, and Henry and Sasha were not on good terms. The team lacked cohesion, ruining any working environment. Henry and Dana thought that the sessions were lengthy, while other members thought that they were unnecessary. It is a problem in the norming stage that affected the performing stage. The team wrought on different tasks orientation, high conflicting ideas, and poor decision making, which is why the business plan was behind schedule. Several issues cause the lack of unity. First, the members of the team have contradicting characters. Instead of exploring their diverse personalities to create benefit-oriented ideas, the team members do not achieve the progress because of their differences and constant contradictions. This issue hinders the team’s progress and makes it difficult to concentrate on a specific idea. Instead of the team using their differences as an asset, they misused the opportunity and even called off duties they had been assigned. These differences led negative socio-emotional needs between the team as evidenced in the case analysis. The team lacks cohesion mainly due to their conflicting characters, ages, sexes, attitudes, educations, skills, beliefs, and values. Different characters negate the ability of the group to blend and bond successfully. The company has no mutual relationships among the employees while all team members have different visions of achieving the company’s goals. Secondly, the team lacks trust among the current employees due to the lack of a common goal. The team itself did not set up values and norms to create a good working environment with other team members. For instance, some members think that the company should turn into an entertainment business, while others think that the company should target the children by teaching them music with help of gaming software. Third, the lack of unity may have been caused by the lack of a team leader. Without a responsible leader, the team could not define the role structure, assessment of team performance, and initiate the decision making process. Lastly, another problem presented in the team was stereotypes possessed by the members ...