By taking a little poetic license with an old adage from the world of competitive sports—that often the best offense is a good defense —we can also find a lesson that applies to auto insurance. For example, telematics has recently given insurers the ability to analyze policyholders' driving habits, including mileage, maneuvers, times of day, and locations.

While traditional rating attributes, such as credit scores or motor vehicle records, provide information analogous to the back of a baseball card, telematics effectively represents a leap to full-fledged scouting reports for each risk. This information is powerful, but its collection and use require heavy hardware and wireless communication costs.

As a result, until now, telematics has almost exclusively been the domain of self-insured large fleets and a few national insurers. However, executives at all companies need look only to their counterparts in the sports world—from boxing to football, hockey, or basketball—to see how telematics can be used defensively to obtain successful and surprising outcomes, regardless of company scope or specialty.