[Note: All names and other personal data in this recommendation letter sample have been changed.] 

Masahiko Tanaka
Lead Partner
Customer Relationship Management Services
McKinsey & Company
Tokyo, Japan

March 8, 2020

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 Japan. CRM consulting is one of the most important parts of our business so this is an extraordinary level of responsibility and illustrates our regard for him as a professional.
               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 East Asia division to earn this extremely prestigious IT industry certification (awarded based on the results of a competitive examination).
              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