Most executives learn about kaizen from a book. Hassan Jameel learned it with a stopwatch, a notepad, and a week spent logging every movement a car-cleaning operative made during a working day.
Jameel, now vice chairman of Saudi Arabia for Abdul Latif Jameel, grew up between Saudi Arabia and Japan. His family’s business relationship with Toyota had deep roots — his uncle traveled to Japan for a Toyota training program in the late 1960s, his father studied at university there — and Japan became a formative environment for the next generation too. Jameel attended high school and university in Tokyo and spent university vacations interning at Toyota.
He holds a Bachelor of Arts in International Economics from Sophia University in Tokyo and an MBA from London Business School. He speaks English, Arabic and Japanese. The trilingual background reflects an upbringing that moved between cultures and absorbed each one rather than treating any as peripheral.
The decisive professional experience came in 2004, when Jameel joined Toyota’s domestic kaizen division — the first non-Japanese person to do so. The division worked with Toyota dealers across Japan to implement continuous improvement projects: supply chain efficiency, inventory management, service center operations. Teams would spend months with a dealer, create a process, implement it, and make sure it held after they left.
The lessons from that placement never left him. His conviction that frontline operations are where improvement actually lives — not in the executive suite — traces directly to those months in Japan. A driver reassigning stock yard lanes to save his team three hours a day is, in Jameel’s view, precisely how organizations are supposed to work.
Jameel returned to Abdul Latif Jameel carrying the kaizen division’s core principle: improvement comes from removing waste, not adding complexity. His supervisor’s phrase stayed with him. If you want to solve a problem, don’t add to it — subtract from it. Strip out the unnecessary steps until you reach the critical path, then start improving from there.
That framework now runs through Abdul Latif Jameel’s operations. The company’s Best in Town program, a kaizen initiative with teams across multiple countries, holds annual conferences to share what frontline staff have learned. Jameel visits locations personally, in the genchi genbutsu tradition of observing work directly, and says he measures the program’s success not by management enthusiasm but by whether people on the front line are asking when it’s coming to their site.
Outside the business, Jameel sits on the UTokyo Global Advisory Board for the University of Tokyo and the MIT School of Engineering Dean’s Advisory Council, maintaining the academic connections that have run through his family’s approach to knowledge and institution-building for decades.