[Note:
All names and other personal data in this sample recommendation have been changed.
This letter of recommendation has been sent to many major graduate schools in
the
Masahiko Tanaka
Lead Partner
Customer Relationship
Management Services
McKinsey & Company
Dear Admissions
Committee,
I
have worked closely with Takayuki Kubota as his immediate supervisor at McKinsey
& Company, a business and information technology consulting firm, since April
2000. He asked me to recommend him to your graduate program, and I am pleased
to take this opportunity to describe some of his many outstanding professional
and personal qualities.
Takayuki is one of the most outstanding young professionals I have
worked with in my career here. He displays excellent skill as a leader, high
motivation and effectiveness, and exceptional enthusiasm and dedication. These
rare qualities have made it possible to entrust him with a great deal of
responsibility early in his career.
His
responsibilities included defining our clients’ core business issues and making
presentations to these companies to sell our consulting services, an extremely
important task only given to the most trusted and effective members of our
organization. As a result of Takayuki’s excellent preparation, responsiveness
to client needs, and excellent communication skills, the team he led generated
over $30 million in sales of consulting services and he was given
responsibility for Customer Relationship Management
(CRM) consulting for all of
Because of
his exceptional leadership and effectiveness as a consultant, Takayuki was
sometimes asked to take over responsibility for consulting projects that were
not going well. Turning around a troubled project is one of the most difficult
tasks we can ask of our mangers. Takayuki consistently showed great skill in
assessing the project’s problems, revising the initial plan, and coordinating
the resources to bring it to a successful solution. As a result of his
professional skill, Takayuki won a prestigious award from a client for best
consulting work on a telecom project.
As a result
of senior management’s faith in Takayuki as one of the very most exceptional
young professionals in our organization, we asked him to conduct a company wide
seminar to share his knowledge and experience on best practices for selling and
implementing information technology and marketing strategy consulting, and he
was given a budget and staff to plan the curriculum, design materials, and
teach the course. His course was an outstanding synthesis of his own and other
mangers’ best practices for selling, planning, implementing, and evaluating
major technology consulting projects, and helped spread the best of our knowledge
and expertise in this area throughout the corporation.
While
already one of the very most outstanding members of our organization, Takayuki
is always working to expand his knowledge and skill as a professional. He was
recently designated as a Siebel 7 Certified Consultant, and
was the first member of McKinsey’s
Takayuki’s personality traits are equally praiseworthy. Cooperative,
friendly, and lively, he is well liked and respected both by his colleagues and
by senior management. I have the greatest confidence that he would be a
wonderful addition to your graduate program. I am proud to give him my highest
possible recommendation for admission.
Sincerely,
Masahiko Tanaka