What Two Years Inside Toyota’s Kaizen Division Taught Hassan Jameel About Business

A Saudi in Toyota’s Improvement Department

Hassan Jameel grew up hearing about kaizen before he fully understood it. His father and senior ALJ executives discussed it often, and the company had been absorbing Toyota’s management philosophy since the 1950s. It was not until 2004, however, when Hassan joined Toyota’s domestic Kaizen division in Japan, that the philosophy became concrete.

He was the first non-Japanese person to hold a position in that division. His team’s job was to visit Toyota dealers across Japan, spend weeks observing frontline workers with stopwatches and notepads, map every action and its duration, and then work with the team to eliminate wasted time. The results were often surprising: six minutes of walking to retrieve tools, multiplied across eight technicians and 52 weeks, became half a working day saved every week.

Subtract, Don’t Add

A lesson from his manager stayed with him. “If you want to solve a problem, don’t add to it — subtract from it,” Hassan has recounted. The instruction reframes improvement as removal: identify waste, eliminate it, and build from what remains. Spending money on technology or new processes before that step is taken is, in the kaizen framework, the wrong sequence.

He also described a stint repainting a stockyard — done by hand, over 10 days, in wind and snow. When he asked why they didn’t pay contractors to do it, his manager explained that doing it themselves meant understanding the process deeply enough to improve it the following year. Knowledge transferred through action, not delegation.

What It Became at ALJ

Those experiences shaped how Hassan now runs operations at Abdul Latif Jameel. He conducts front-line visits to showrooms, sits with teams to walk through hoshin kanri planning, and meets employees in person when their ideas generate real results. The “Best in Town” program — ALJ’s internal kaizen initiative — now operates across the company’s global business units, with conferences drawing delegates from multiple countries each year.

“Continuous improvement, to me as an individual, is not only about improving oneself every day,” Hassan has said. “It’s about how you build that mentality into your lifestyle, so it becomes automatic.” That formulation arrived in a Toyota stockyard in Japan, and it has guided how he has led ever since.