Abdullah Osman Abdi was not a manager or an engineer. He was a driver at a Toyota showroom and service center on Madinah Road in Jeddah – Saudi Arabia, responsible for moving customer vehicles between the facility and the central stock yard. He had no formal authority over the yard’s layout, no budget to work with, and no particular mandate to improve anything beyond the task in front of him. He noticed a problem anyway.
The dedicated lanes assigned to the Madinah Road branch at the National Distribution Center in Al Khomrah were positioned more than 150 meters from the main exit gate. For a team of drivers moving 20 to 40 cars each day through blistering Saudi heat, that distance added 10 to 15 minutes of walking per vehicle. Across approximately 600 vehicle movements a month, the wasted time was considerable. Abdullah raised the issue with his manager, Abdulaziz Salah Atarji, the branch’s sales manager. Atarji took it up the chain to the distribution center’s management. The lanes were reassigned to a location far closer to the exit.
The difference was immediate. “What used to take three to four hours is now being done in 15 minutes,” Abdullah said. The result earned him formal recognition from his peers and the company’s leadership, including Hassan Jameel, Deputy President and Vice Chairman, Saudi Arabia, of Abdul Latif Jameel. “It was a special day when Mr. Hassan Jameel met me,” Abdullah said. “I was overwhelmed and very happy, and I feel very much appreciated.”
Hassan Jameel: Small Changes, Serious Results
For Hassan Jameel, the story is precisely the kind of outcome the company has worked to make possible. Abdul Latif Jameel Motors has operated under the influence of kaizen, Toyota’s philosophy of continuous improvement, since the two companies began their relationship in the 1955. The core premise of kaizen is that the people doing the work are best placed to identify what is wasteful about it, and that the accumulation of small improvements, each modest on its own, drives meaningful change over time.
Hassan Jameel has spoken at length about what Kaizen looks like in practice, including the instinct to remove rather than add when a problem surfaces. A mentor at Toyota put it to him this way: if you want to solve a problem, don’t add to it, subtract from it. Find the waste, eliminate it, and what remains is a cleaner process you can actually build on.
Abdullah’s solution followed that logic without any theoretical framing behind it. He did not propose a new system, additional staff, or a technology fix. He identified unnecessary distance, flagged it to someone who could act on it, and the lanes moved. The problem shrank to nothing because the waste was removed.
Respect as Operational Policy
Hassan Jameel has described respect as something that has to be built into the structure of an organization, not just expressed through individual behavior. “Respect isn’t only about being nice and saying good morning and good evening to somebody,” he has said. “It’s also about implementing policies, procedures, standards that create an environment of respect for people, where they feel valued, where they feel responsible for their own performance and where they feel empowered to voice their opinions and share their ideas.”
Abdullah’s willingness to bring the lane problem to his manager, and Atarji’s willingness to escalate it, reflects that kind of environment in action. The idea moved from a driver to a sales manager to distribution center management and resulted in a practical change, all without bureaucratic friction. That chain of communication functioning as it did is itself a product of how the organization is built.
Hassan Jameel visits frontline operations directly and regularly, a practice rooted in the Toyota principle of genchi genbutsu: go to the place where the work happens, observe it yourself, and draw conclusions from what you actually see rather than what reports suggest. His visit to recognize Abdullah was consistent with that approach. Acknowledging a driver’s contribution in person is not a ceremonial gesture in this context. It is part of how the company signals what it values.
A Culture Still Being Built
Abdul Latif Jameel Motors formalizes its kaizen practice through an internal program called “best in town,” which tasks each business unit with achieving deep familiarity with its local market rather than chasing broad global comparisons. The program has drawn more than 150 delegates from global operations to regional conferences, and Hassan Jameel has noted that frontline employees at locations where the program has not yet arrived frequently ask when it is coming.
The objective, as he has put it, is a culture that acts on continuous improvement in perpetuity, one where the behavior is automatic rather than mandated. Getting there requires that every person in the organization, from senior leadership to a driver in a Jeddah stock yard, feels that their observations matter and that raising them will lead somewhere.
Abdullah Osman Abdi noticed something, said something, and three to four hours became 15 minutes. At Abdul Latif Jameel, that is not a footnote. It is the point.
