Marketing maven Seth Godin thinks that projects of the like that he and his colleagues think about and work on daily can sometimes seem a little vague, and that applying some rigor to the process might produce better results. I couldn’t agree more.

I have a newfound appreciation for a lot of disciplines I previously ignored, including politics and marketing. I once cast them off because they were so hard to define in quantitative terms, but now think there must be measures outside my finance/accounting mindset that can be used.

Certainly, getting the I’s dotted and T’s crossed, and actually predefining the purpose, cannot hurt.