To whom this may concern:
I am a big fan reader of the semimonthly mail magazine titled “Solid As Faith,” which Mr. Ichikawa has written to the business leaders and the proprietors in Japan since 1999. I am also his business partner that created the frequent opportunities for him to discover his new clients.
Mr. Ichikawa often refers to himself as a mere business planner not as a business consultant. He never prepares stereotyped solutions when he faces with clients’ business problems or their targets that are highly set. He instead creates best solutions imaginable to each case, woven out from his broad knowledge of the strategy and tactics building. He sometimes adopts Lanchester’s Linear Law, or classic marketing principles of McCarthy or Levitt. He even reveals his insights from books on Carl von Clausewitz.
He then mobilizes any conceivable tools to have the organization members to materialize the solutions. The theories of Herzberg and the principles of Mintzberg are his old tools of mastership. Methods of lecturing, instructing, advising, coaching, shadowing, and facilitating are included in his masterstroke to motivate the people in front of him.
Mr. Ichikawa gathers enormous amount of information to comprehend the given situations. He carefully observes the facilities. Starting with the interviews with executives, he listens to factory labors and even to genitors. He subscribes the related trade journals. He would further stretch to buy fashion magazines to familiarize himself to the lifestyle of designated group of female employees.
I have introduced him to companies of many trades with a wide variety of business problems and tasks. Every time he discusses with the company executives, particularly small-scaled company proprietors, he never leaves the rooms without impressing them. This has become possible because of the combination of his skills of processing new information, creating unique solutions and influencing people as well as because of his profound knowledge and challenging experience in the field of strategy and tactics making.
I firmly believe that Mr. Ichikawa is the most appropriate person for the situation where an organization is demanded to proceed in a new direction. And I know that’s Mr. Ichikawa’s favorite situation, sometimes deserted by the ordinary business consultants with the stereotyped obsolete methods to tell.