Despite their large departments of analysts, statisticians and data modelers (decorated with MBAs and PhDs from prestigious schools), many companies are failing to perform in today’s hyper-competitive markets.

So what differentiates companies that successfully capitalize on customer intelligence from those who don't? In a word: Execution.

As a closer look at companies that successfully leverage customer insight (such as Harrah's, Tesco, Capital One, GE and P&G) suggests, the key success factor is the ability to truly execute their strategies – and operationalize their insight. “Strategies most often fail because they aren’t executed well,” state Larry Bossidy and Ram Charam in their best-selling book Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. “Things that are supposed to happen don’t happen. Either the organizations aren’t capable of making them happen, or the leaders of the businesses misjudge the challenges their companies face in the business environment or both.”

The authors describe three “core processes” that underlie execution-oriented leadership: people; strategy; and operations. Successful companies, quite simply, tend to have great rigor and discipline in all of these interconnected areas. Execution, as the authors state, includes "making assumptions about the business environment, assessing the organization’s capabilities, linking strategy to operations and the people who are going to implement the strategy, synchronizing those people and their various disciplines, and linking rewards to outcomes…In its most fundamental sense, execution is a systematic way of exposing reality and acting on it.”