Candidate for
Board Member; Geyserville Fire Protection District

In my very first visit in the early 1980s, I fell in love with our Dry Creek Valley and determined to come back and make my permanent home. In 1989, I made my cross-country move from New York City. This year 2010 marks my twenty-first year living in the community served by GFPD.

However, my job requires frequent traveling and never affords me with opportunities to work within the community. In 2008, I decided to make an attempt to change that, and submitted my application to the firefighters training academy. Subsequently in December 2009, I was admitted to be a volunteer firefighter for GFPD.

During my training, I have learned a very important piece of truth, which I now call the principle of firefighting. Firefighting is a win/win game where nobody is allowed to fail but to win and survive together while serving to save lives of others.

In today's challenging economy, I am seeing the very same principle is now starting to put in practice in the world of business.

As a management consultant focused on leadership strategies, I work with large business enterprises in transition whereby their survivals depend upon the entrepreneurial mindset of high performing individuals to collaborate and to create situations where everybody gets to win. In fact, it is becoming to be the key issue for the management working to find ways to survive and ultimately to transform the organization. Particularly when the world values people's engagement with insight and creativity far more than average, cheap products and services. Those companies still competing in the centuries-old win/lose or zero-sum game of slashing down the cost of production by commoditizing their own workers to produce mediocre products and services have no chance surviving in today's marketplace.

In my earlier days as a foreign student from Japan, I have become fascinated by entrepreneurship thriving in all levels of American society. I believe entrepreneurship is one of the most valuable assets this country possesses since its foundation, and made a promise to myself that I too would someday become such a person who makes a difference and is indispensable to the community I choose to live. Almost 40 years later, I feel that I am finally matured enough to begin actualizing my American dream.