Why Abdul Latif Jameel Motors Benchmarks Itself Against Its Neighborhood, Not the World

Global ambition is a common fixture of corporate strategy. Abdul Latif Jameel Motors has chosen a different benchmark for its continuous improvement program — one borrowed from Toyota and deliberately modest in scope. The program is called “best in town,” and the name is the point.

Rather than measuring performance against an abstract global standard, each business unit focuses on a single question: are we the best option for our local customers, in our specific market, right now? The logic is that deep knowledge of a local area, its customers, their needs, and the competition, produces more actionable improvements than aiming at a global target too diffuse to act on.

Hassan Jameel, Vice Chairman, Saudi Arabia, of Abdul Latif Jameel, has described the distinction this way: the goal is to “know your local market very well, fully understand your customers’ needs, and consistently meet those needs in a much closer, more meaningful way than if you’re aiming to be best in the world — which is a far more abstract goal.”

The program runs across Abdul Latif Jameel’s global operations, with more than 150 delegates gathering for its 2023 regional conference in Saudi Arabia. Jameel has noted that at locations where the program has not yet arrived, frontline staff ask when it is coming, having heard from colleagues elsewhere what it delivers.

The Jeddah stock yard improvement — where a driver’s observation about mislocated lanes cut a three-to-four-hour process to 15 minutes — is the kind of outcome “best in town” is built around. Not a transformation driven from headquarters, but a locally spotted problem, solved by the people who experienced it, with results that were immediate and measurable.