Auto manufacturer Toyota Motor Corp. didn’t start out as the leader in economy cars. But by the 1970s, the public recognized Toyota as the premier manufacturer of quality cars at a low cost.

Steve Spear, author of The High-Velocity Edge, sat down with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the HPE Big Data Conference to discuss what he learned from Toyota and how it ties with analytics.

Spear said that up through the mid-1990s, no auto manufacturer could compete with Toyota. Spear asked executives how a company could replicate its success. They didn’t have an answer. Not because they wouldn’t disclose secrets, but because they really didn’t know.

Analytics: Adjusting and adapting

After years of research, Spear concluded that productivity, reliability and speed of product cycle were three areas where Toyota excelled. When fuel efficiency became a hot topic, it dominated that goal too. “Toyota’s first hook was ‘affordable reliability,” said Spear. “It introduced new product and new brands, such as Lexus, more successfully than others.”

What does this have to do with analytics? Understanding.

“With the Toyota model, it’s not that you design something right, it’s that you design things and you know deeply that what you’ve designed is wrong,” said Spear. “In order to get it right, you need to understand what’s wrong about it and use customer feedback to help you get to what’s right. Analytics can help you gain much greater precision of where things are misfiring so you can adjust and adapt.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Big Data Conference.

Photo by SiliconANGLE