When Hassan Jameel, Vice Chairman, Saudi Arabia, of Abdul Latif Jameel, visited a driver at a Toyota showroom in Jeddah to personally recognize his contribution to improving the branch’s operations, it was not a ceremonial moment. It was consistent with a principle Jameel has carried since his time working at Toyota’s headquarters in Japan.
The principle is genchi genbutsu — a Japanese phrase that translates roughly as “go and see for yourself.” It sits at the core of the Toyota Way and holds that decisions should be grounded in direct observation of the place where work actually happens, not in reports or secondhand accounts. Jameel has described its application at Toyota: managers spent time on the floor with operations teams, sitting with accounts staff, walking service areas, asking questions, and making notes. The point was not to supervise. It was to understand.
That orientation shapes how Jameel runs Abdul Latif Jameel. “If you see something in a report, you have to get up and actually go see it,” he has said. “You’re supposed to get your hands dirty. You cannot manage or take decisions from an office.”
When Abdullah Osman Abdi, a driver at the Madinah Road branch, identified that his team was losing hours each day walking between mislocated stock yard lanes and the exit gate, and raised the issue through his manager, the idea eventually reached leadership. Jameel’s visit to Abdullah afterward was both a recognition and a demonstration of the same logic: the person closest to the work saw the problem most clearly, and that observation deserved acknowledgment in kind.