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To say my dear grandfather is a “serial planner” is something of an understatement. A high-school math teacher and slide-rule expert, his love of details, structure and discipline is legendary. Whenever he travels anywhere, friends and family receive copies of a detailed itinerary well in advance, carefully hand-printed on a pristine sheet of – you guessed it – graph paper.

Seth Godin’s excellent blog post yesterday and one of my clients served to inspire this message. Godin offers one or two posts daily – generally short and packed with insight. If you’re not already a subscriber, it’s worth adding to your list.

Recently several of my clients asked for help putting together company or departmental scorecards. For many organizations and leaders, finding the right set of 5 to 15 leading indicators that provide an absolute pulse on the business (or the department) is a difficult challenge. Often it takes several months or longer to truly fall in love with your Scorecard.

Most entrepreneurs are flying blind – running their businesses on vague sensations, feelings and emotions, rather than data. During a week in which a company wins a big order, gets some positive feedback from a key client, and finally finds the right person to fill a key seat – the company’s owner(s) feel as though they run the very best business in the world. The following week, when the company loses a big sale, gets negative feedback from a client and has to deal with a few people issues – the owner(s) feel as though they run the most troubled company out there.