Kaizen is a word that gets used loosely in business. At Abdul Latif Jameel, it has a dedicated team, a conference circuit, and a defined methodology. The program is called “Best in Town,” and it was adapted from a Toyota initiative of the same name. The premise is deceptively modest: rather than aiming to be the best in the world — an abstraction — each location aims to be the best in its local market. That requires understanding the customer base precisely, meeting needs consistently, and improving every process that touches the guest experience.

“To be the best in your town, you need to know your local market very well, you need to fully understand your customers’ needs, and you need to consistently meet those needs in a much closer, more meaningful way,” Hassan Jameel has explained. More than 150 delegates from Best in Town teams around the world gathered at a recent regional conference in Saudi Arabia to share results across industries and geographies.

Hoshin Kanri and Front-Line Visits

The program is not managed from headquarters. Hassan’s own practice — conducting front-line visits to showrooms in Jeddah and Riyadh, walking through hoshin kanri planning with local teams, touring aftersales facilities — is the model for how Best in Town is supposed to work. Senior leadership goes to where the work happens, not the other way around.

That approach has measurable outcomes. When a driver at a Jeddah stockyard identified that a lane reassignment could cut a three-to-four-hour task down to 15 minutes, the improvement was recognized formally — and Hassan visited the employee personally. Stories like that one are the proof of concept Best in Town uses to spread the culture.

A Culture, Not Just a Program

Hassan has been clear about the long-term goal: not a program that runs alongside normal operations but a mindset that replaces the default. “Our objective as a business is to make sure our culture is one that believes in and acts on continuous improvement in perpetuity,” he has said.

Whether that becomes permanent is the work of years. Abdul Latif Jameel’s 13 consecutive Gold Awards from Toyota suggest the culture is holding — at least in the part of the business where it has been practiced longest.