JEFFREY T. POLZER INGRID VARGAS HILLARY ANGER ELFENBEIN
Henry Tam and the MGI Team
Henry Tam felt tired and extremely frustrated. He was halfway through his final semester in the MBA program at Harvard Business School (HBS), and things were not going as expected. Spring break was about to start, but Henry, like many others in the class of 2002, was feeling the pain of the worst job market in over a decade. Henry recalled the troubled sentiment around campus: Going to business school during the aftermath of the Internet crash changed everything. Before the crash, the feeling was that if you graduated from HBS, you could take on the world. Now people were feeling a lot more insecurity. I was having some doubt about my own capabilities—about what I could accomplish on my own. Anxious to test his abilities and distinguish himself beyond the standard curriculum, Henry had decided to enter the School’s annual business plan contest. About six weeks earlier, in late January, Henry had teamed with HBS classmate Dana Soiman and the founders of start-up company Music Games International (MGI). The MGI founders—an HBS alumnus (MBA ’87) and two professional musicians—later brought two additional students from other institutions onto the team, creating a group composed of diverse views and talents. (See Exhibit 1 for team member bios.) The team was dynamic but very conflicted, and progress on the business plan had been slow. They had a promising product: a CD-ROM music game that children enjoyed playing while learning about music. The team could not agree, however, on a fundamental aspect of the plan—the target market for the product—which made it difficult to move forward. Henry and Dana thought the business plan should focus on gaining a foothold in the education market, whereas the team’s founders wanted to go after the larger, more
