Incremental Quotes & Sayings

Shun the incremental and go for the leap. — Jack Welch

If you look at a farmer and his daily expenditure on existing energy services, it is much higher on an incremental delta basis. And then there is an emotional cost of not providing their kids with the right to educate. If you calculate these costs in economic terms and create a financing mechanism for them to buy it, the emotional delta cost is much higher compared to their household. — Ramon Magsaysay

An effective leader develops the ability to correctly identify the pertinent detail or details - incidentals in a market, industry or sport that might create an incremental advantage. — John Wooden

Today's Republican Party ... is an insurgent outlier. It has become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all but declaring war on the government. The Democratic Party, while no paragon of civic virtue, is more ideologically centered and diverse, protective of the government's role as it developed over the course of the last century, open to incremental changes in policy fashioned through bargaining with the Republicans, and less disposed to or adept at take-no-prisoners conflict between the parties. This asymmetry between the parties, which journalists and scholars often brush aside or whitewash in a quest for "balance," constitutes a huge obstacle to effective governance. — Thomas E. Mann

The maximalist demand of a complete ban on weapons, and the 'incremental steps' towards disarmament are both jammed. Will advancing IHL help both of these processes? — Jonathan Granoff

If we have learned nothing else from the 20th century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek. — Tony Judt

It's also true that many companies get comfortable doing what they have always done, with a few incremental changes. This kind of incrementalism leads to irrelevance over time, especially in technology, because change tends to be revolutionary not evolutionary. — Eric Schmidt

The reality is that most innovative work is incremental improvement. It's about staying ahead of trends as opposed to reacting to trends. — Bill Sheridan

Sometimes it's more difficult to achieve a 10% cost reduction than it is to tell people they have to achieve 50%. Small incremental steps block your view of doing something fundamentally different. — Eckhard Pfeiffer

When people tell me they're trying to meditate, I always know they don't have a format yet that works. I encourage a real meditative format that you use daily, because meditation is incremental and it only works if done every day. — Deborah King

The press doesn't stop publishing, by the way, in a fascist escalation; it simply watches what it says. That too can be an incremental process, and the pace at which the free press polices itself depends on how journalists are targeted. — Naomi Wolf

Your challenge as #GIRLBOSS is to dive headfirst into things without being too attached to the results. When your goal is to gain experience, perspective, and knowledge, failure is no longer a possibility. Failure is your invention.I believe that there is a silver lining in everything, and once you being to see it, you'll need sunglasses to combat the glare. It is she who listens to the rest of the world who fails, and it is she who has enough confidence to define success and failure for herself who succeeds. These words were not invented for an incremental life. "Success" and "failure" serve a world that is black-and-white. And as I said before, it's all just kinda grey. — Sophia Amoruso

Unwavering incremental change can create remarkable and monumental results. — Ryan Lilly

As an investor with small capital, one should prefer businesses that have high returns on capital and that require little incremental investment to grow. — Warren Buffett

So we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate. But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us. — Naomi Klein

companies that tie up very little extra working capital with incremental sales tend to be more attractive. — Lawrence A. Cunningham

I am fascinated by tiny, incremental changes, almost imperceptible shifts in how people orient themselves in the world, because those are in some ways the most hopeful. — Leni Zumas

Chobani did a really wonderful yogurt campaign on 'Instagram' to shift perceptions away from the fact that they were just yogurt. And they had a 7-point incremental lift on shifting that perception through a brand advertisement on Instagram. — Kevin Systrom

Freedom is an incremental process. — Wm. Paul Young

When I'm writing a score, I'm constantly looking for ways to improve on it, even when I think it's working well. I don't give up on things, and am always trying to make incremental improvements, which means I never finish writing a score early! — Geoff Zanelli

Responsible Development shares many practices with XP but the roots are different. Responsible Development's values are honesty, transparency, accountability and responsibility. These lead me to pairing, test-first, incremental design, continuous integration and so on because they support the values. — Kent Beck

My philosophy, one of the biggest enemies of future success is past success, because you become complacent, you become risk averse, and that's one of the things we try to drive here, and this is fundamental to this philosophy, and that's in this component change, and also in value creation. That we need to drive creative destruction, not just incremental innovations, but innovations that will change the whole nature of the business. — Charles Koch

I did a lot of good work for the rest of the forty years ... science is an incremental thing. Everything builds on everything else, it's a pattern, it's a mosaic. — Gustav Nossal

I think about the automobile, I think about like, when I was a kid, you know, the invention of the answering machine, which I was like, 'Wow.' Or call waiting, which was, like, very big. It was a very big thing. Call waiting was a very big thing. And these incremental innovations happen constantly. — Ashton Kutcher

You got to be careful to not get too comfortable with incremental improvement. I think sometimes you just got to jump off a ledge. — Merlin Mann

The basic metaphor of prototypes still seems apt to me. There are no answers or magic pills. There is no alternative to learning through experimentation. Benchmarking and studying "best practices" will not suffice - because the prototyping process does not involve just incremental changes in established ways of doing things, but radical new ideas and practices that together create a new way of managing. — Peter M. Senge

Wars do not always begin with an abrupt, cymbal-crash rupture of conditions properly characterized as peace. There can be almost seamlessly incremental transitions. — George Will

Having acquired an espresso machine as good as a solid e-61 and a very good grinder, your incremental dollars will be best spent on either buying truly badass coffee, or setting up a roasting setup yourself that with lots of effort will allow you to produce high end roasted coffee. — Ken Fox

Please don't make the mistake of thinking the arts and sciences are at odds with one another. That is a recent, stupid, and damaging idea. You don't have to be unscientific to make beautiful art, to write beautiful things.
If you need proof: Twain, Adams, Vonnegut, McEwen, Sagan, Shakespeare, Dickens. For a start.
You don't need to be superstitious to be a poet. You don't need to hate GM technology to care about the beauty of the planet. You don't have to claim a soul to promote compassion.
Science is not a body of knowledge nor a system of belief; it is just a term which describes humankind's incremental acquisition of understanding through observation. Science is awesome. — Tim Minchin

Incrementalism: In the first generation, the goal of the movement was wholesale social and cultural transformation. Small, incremental victories were too little given the magnitude of America's moral decay. Since 1988, the new leaders have recognized that incrementalism is the surest path to success in political competition. The current movement is committed to securing small victories now, postponing for the long-term more fundamental changes in society and politics. — Kenneth D. Wald

I can tell you many reasons why environmental stories don't get adequate attention in conventional media. Basically, environmental risks don't fit the norms of journalism. They're incremental. We hate incremental. — Andrew Revkin

Surely a program of incremental reforms, of cautious steps, is the wisest way to proceed? You show xtraordinary erudition for an eighth-stratum, Archivist. I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: "An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps." We — David Mitchell

I can't recite the chronology or elaborate on the facts. I can't explain the reasons or defend how we lived our lives. What I can tell you is how the events of 1933 sowed the seeds that fundamentally changed our future, that there was little hand-wringing or emotion, that circumstances were beyond control, that there was no recourse or appeal. I can tell you that events were incremental, that the unbelievable became the believable and, ultimately, the normal.

Ralph Webster, A Smile in One Eye: a Tear in the Other — Ralph Webster

School improvement is not a mystery. Incremental, even dramatic improvement is not only possible but probable under the right conditions. — Michael J. Schmoker

She worked many jobs, many hours a day, for many years, and at thirty-four, she graduated from college. She then slowly taught herself, through small, incremental changes, to treat "even the most difficult interactions as opportunities for me to reveal what I'm capable of and to express my worthiness." Imagine that. That sounds like presence. The — Amy Cuddy

If you're worried about putting food on the table or putting a roof over your head, that stress is definitely will contribute to unhappiness, but once you have your basic needs met then incremental money. — Tony Hsieh

I don't want to make an incremental change in some technology in my life. I want to create a whole new technology, and one that is aimed at helping humanity at all levels regardless of geography or ethnicity or age or gender. — Elizabeth Holmes

Healing is as incremental and mysterious as the damage ... what took time, takes time. — William P. Young

You can create value with breakthrough innovation, incremental refinement, or complex coordination. Great companies often do two of these. The very best companies do all three. — Sam Altman

Ideally, the ISS program will just be one more incremental step on an expanding, incredible journal of exploration and understanding, taking us higher and farther. — Ron Garan

The repression of virtuous instinct in the modern world is an incremental tragedy. Repress one instinct, and you repress many; other parts of consciousness go down, also. — Michael Leunig

Happiness is the offspring of concentrated action. Excellence is achieved through the progressive realization of incremental goals along the path of your life's mission. — Robin Sharma

Liberals have a new wish every time their latest wish is granted. Conservatives should make them spell out their principles and ideals. Instead of doing this, conservatives allow liberals to pursue incremental goals without revealing their ultimate destination. So, thanks to the negligence of their opponents, liberals control the terms of every debate by always demanding 'more' while never defining 'enough.' The predictable result is that they always get more, and it's never enough. — Joseph Sobran

The Practising Manager's Growth Mantra

-Growth in an enterprise is created through remarkable achievements, not incremental achievements like efficiency or effectiveness.

-Remarkable achievements are possible only in complexity.

-Only volitional engagement can work in complexity. Luckily, there is no certainty in complexity. Hence, motivational engagement cannot work.

-People who make choices based on the purpose can only be volitionally engaged - they are the growth managers, the leaders. — Amit Chatterjee

I can tell you that events were incremental, that the unbelievable became the believable and, ultimately, the normal. — Ralph Webster

From year to year, environmental changes are incremental and often barely register in our lives, but from evolutionary or geological perspectives, what is happening is explosive change. — David Suzuki

Everything worthwhile in life requires incremental effort — Radhakrshna Dasari

Effective prevention of mass killings is incremental and its heroes are invisible. — Timothy Snyder

Incrementalism can lead to local maxima. Be willing to explore to find the big wins before testing smaller changes and tweaks. Conversely, sometimes it's the incremental refinements that prove or disprove your hypotheses about what your users respond to. Use the insights from small tests to guide and inform your thinking about bigger changes. Consider entirely new alternative approaches to your principal business goals. Be willing to go beyond just testing "variations on a theme" - you might be surprised. If you're working on a major site redesign or overhaul, don't wait until the new design is live to A/B test it. A/B test the redesign itself. — Dan Siroker

You can do almost anything if you are willing to clarify your commitments and make incremental investments over time to achieve them. — Michael Hyatt

In an increasingly non-linear economy, incremental change is not enough-you have to build a capacity for strategy innovation, one that increases your ability to recognize new opportunities. — Gary Hamel

Because genes work in combination, the incremental effect of adding a new gene to a genome may be not linear, but exponential. — Gary F. Marcus

Whatever I endure in recovery, I need never again suffer the indignity of active addiction. The despair and hopelessness. The inexhaustible cycle of incremental self-immolation. I am reminded of how far I've come, of the miracle that, with help and humility, I can, one day at a time, live free from drugs and alcohol. — Russell Brand

And this is how it started. Just with coffee and the exchange of their long stories. Love can be incremental. Predicaments, too. Coffee can start a life just as it can start a day. This was the meeting of two people who were destined to love from before they were born, from before they made choices that would complicate their lives. This love just rolled toward my mother as though she were standing at the bottom of a steep hill. Mother had no hand in this, only heart. — Tayari Jones

As a small business or startup, one of the factors you should always consider when looking at a potential partnership is the incremental potential reach. Note that wider reach doesn't always mean a better partnership opportunity. Instead of sheer scale, take a look at which communities your potential partner can open up for you. — Leah Busque

Most cleantech companies crashed because they neglected one or more of the seven questions that every business must answer: 1. The Engineering Question Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements? 2. The Timing Question Is now the right time to start your particular business? 3. The Monopoly Question Are you starting with a big share of a small market? 4. The People Question Do you have the right team? 5. The Distribution Question Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product? 6. The Durability Question Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future? 7. The Secret Question Have you identified a unique opportunity that — Peter Thiel

It's probably fair to say that Obama's ideas were too big for America's appetite. It would have been nice had he made a few incremental repairs to the economy and left the transformative events for a less stressful time. — Kathleen Parker

The iterative piece of agile can be defined by four key terms: iterative, feature-based, timeboxed, and incremental. — Jim Highsmith

Our investments in data, Internet and international have been particularly timely and have positioned the company to post industry-leading incremental revenue gains. — Bernard Ebbers

Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told. — Neil Gaiman

1. The Engineering Question Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements? 2. The Timing Question Is now the right time to start your particular business? 3. The Monopoly Question Are you starting with a big share of a small market? 4. The People Question Do you have the right team? 5. The Distribution Question Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product? 6. The Durability Question Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future? 7. The Secret Question Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don't see? — Peter Thiel

The government is also looking at further benefits including enhanced capital allowances; the use of Tax Incremental Finance; and extra help from UK Trade and Investment on inward investment and trade opportunities. — Andy Sawford

The way Smith sees it, this kind of approach denotes a certain category of writer: the Micro Manager. Authors fall into one of two primary camps, she explained in her 2009 book of essays, Changing My Mind.691 Macro Planners work out the structure of their novels and then write within that structure. Micro Managers, on the other hand, don't rely on an overarching configuration (don't even conceive of one), but rather home in on each sentence, one by one, and each sentence, as they come to it, becomes the only thing that exists. If there is a spectrum starting with Macro Planners on one end and Micro Managers on the other, Smith would be somewhere to the right of the page. Smith's writing is entirely incremental and cumulative. The grand plan is that there is no grand plan; working things out ahead of time ruins everything, "feels disastrous."She prefers the writing of a novel as a process of discovery. "The thinking goes on on the page," not beforehand. — Sarah Stodola

It is a myth that we can get systems "right the first time." Instead, we should implement only today's stories, then refactor and expand the system to implement new stories tomorrow. This is the essence of iterative and incremental agility. Test-driven development, refactoring, and the clean code they produce make this work at the code level. — Robert C. Martin

A company at the top of its game has accumulated a number of rules of thumb - implicit assumptions and beliefs about what has been central to its success. New technologies and business models belie or change some of those assumptions, but they only seem sensible if the management team can become aware of those implicit assumptions and mind-sets and suspend them for a moment to contemplate the change. It's very hard to do that with the inherited wisdom, experience, and lore of a company. This is why the failures of incumbents to capture the benefits of disruptive innovations are a result not of bad managers, but of good managers practicing what they have done best. Incremental innovations can quickly be scaled and incorporated. Disruptive innovations require changes in customer sets, business models, or performance metrics that are no longer consistent with what led to success in the past. — Stefan Heck

I have a feeling there is no ideal situation, unless she could go back in time and be 22 again. I think some of it is just kind of the shock of realizing that you're approaching middle age, or that you are middle-aged and kind of coming to terms with that in whatever incremental ways. — Amanda Peet

Although scientific revolutions in how we see the world do occur, the bulk of our scientific understanding comes from the cumulative impact of numerous incremental studies that together paint an increasingly coherent picture of how nature works. — Michael E. Mann

Value innovation places equal emphasis on value and innovation. Value without innovation tends to focus on value creation on an incremental scale, something that improves value but is not sufficient to make you stand out in the marketplace.18 Innovation without value tends to be technology-driven, market pioneering, or futuristic, often shooting beyond what buyers are ready to accept and pay for.19 In this sense, it is important to distinguish between value innovation as opposed to technology innovation and market pioneering. — W.Chan Kim

The nature of the issues facing U.S. students is a bit more complicated in the U.S. because the assault on the social state, until recently, has been more incremental [i.e. the stripping of public services and so forth], whereas in Britain with the rise of the conservative-liberal government, it was immediate and bold in its assault on the social state and higher education. — Henry Giroux

The limitations of federal laws are able to create real progress at the local level. Ultimately, to effect not just incremental progress but progress that is transformational for students, we need committed leadership - people who believe deeply that their students can achieve at the highest levels and who know how to create the conditions at the classroom, school and system level to give them the opportunities they deserve. — Wendy Kopp

Especially in technology, we need revolutionary change, not incremental change. — Larry Page

We have had significant success in the reduction of salt in food, but it has to be understood that this can only be achieved working with the industry on a voluntary basis ... and it can only be done on an incremental basis. — Andrew Lansley

Small mistakes, the lack of care, little accidents, and somewhere a tipping point is passed and things go badly wrong. Expedition history brims with tragedies built out of incremental missteps. — Alan S. Kesselheim

Managers are trained to make incremental, programmatic improvements. They aren't trained to lead large-scale change. — John P. Kotter

Targeted marketing delivers a lower customer acquisition cost and gets you to profitable growth faster. The goal is to quickly identify the costs associated with acquiring your most profitable segment of customers and the incremental value - if any - of going beyond your core. — Jay Samit

The profound point is that the critical link between growth and value creation is the return on incremental capital. Since share prices tend to follow earnings over the long term, the more capital that can be deployed at high rates of return to drive greater earnings growth, the more valuable a company becomes. Warren Buffett summarized the point best: "Leaving the question of price aside, the best business to own is one that over an extended period can employ large amounts of incremental capital at very high rates of return."4 The best investments, in other words, combine strong growth with high returns on capital. — Lawrence A. Cunningham

Henry had never felt so happy. Freshperson year had been one thing, an adventure, an exhilaration, all in all a success, but it had also been exhausting, a constant struggle and adjustment and tumult. Now he was locked in. Every day that summer had the same framework, the alarm at the same time, meals and workouts and shifts and SuperBoost at the same times, over and over, and it was that sameness, that repetition, that gave life meaning. He savored the tiny variations, the incremental improvements
tuna fish on his salad instead of turkey; tow extra reps on the bench press. Every move he made had purpose. — Chad Harbach

Over time I've learned, surprisingly, that it's tremendously hard to get teams to be super ambitious. It turns out most people haven't been educated in this kind of moonshot thinking. They tend to assume that things are impossible, rather than starting from real-world physics and figuring out what's actually possible. It's why we've put so much energy into hiring independent thinkers at Google, and setting big goals. Because if you hire the right people and have big enough dreams, you'll usually get there. And even if you fail, you'll probably learn something important. It's also true that many companies get comfortable doing what they have always done, with a few incremental changes. This kind of incrementalism leads to irrelevance over time, especially in technology, because change tends to be revolutionary not evolutionary. So you need to force yourself to place big bets on the future. — Eric Schmidt

Radical change is scary. It's terrifying, actually. And the feminism I support is a full-on revolution. Where women are not simply
allowed
to participate in the world as it already exists - an inherently corrupt world, designed by a patriarchy to subjugate and control and destroy all challengers - but are actively able to re-shapeit. Where women do not simply knock on the doors of churches, of governments, of capitalist marketplaces and politely ask for admittance, but create their own religious systems, governments, and economies. My feminism is not one of incremental change, revealed in the end to be The Same As Ever, But More So. It is a cleansing fire. — Jessa Crispin

I was lucky enough to build on the work of a number of people who had already run laps around this theory-building track. The original classification scheme, years ago, distinguished radical from incremental change. The theory said that established firms managed incremental change well, but would be expected to founder when their industry encountered a radical change. — Clayton Christensen

incremental development can be disconcerting for teams and management who aren't used to it because it front-loads the stress in a project. — Steve Freeman

I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a by-product. The course was more plodding than heroic: I did not strive valiantly against doubters but took incremental steps studded with a few intuitive leaps. — Steve Martin

This book argues that evolution is happening all around us. It is the best way of understanding how the human world changes, as well as the natural world. Change in human institutions, artefacts and habits is incremental, inexorable and inevitable. It follows a narrative, going from one stage to the next; it creeps rather than jumps; it has its own spontaneous momentum, — Matt Ridley

The presidential candidates are offering prescriptions for everything from Iraq to healthcare, but listen closely. Their fixes are situational and incremental. Meanwhile, the underlying structural problems in American politics and government are systemic and prevent us from solving our most intractable challenges. — Larry J. Sabato

With regard to electric vehicles, I am all for them because most of the incremental electricity needed to run those vehicles will come from gas-fired electric generation. However, I do not believe it is wise for America to substitute dependence on foreign oil for dependence on Chinese batteries. — Aubrey McClendon

Even earthquakes are the consequence of tensions built up over long spans of time, imperceptibly, incrementally. You don't notice the buildup, just the release. You see a sick person, an old person, a dying person, the sight sinks in, and somewhere down the road you change your life. In movies and novels, people change suddenly and permanently, which is convenient and dramatic but not much like life, where you gain distance on something, relapse, resolve, try again, and move along in stops, starts, and stutters. Change is mostly slow. In my life, there had been transformative events, and I'd had a few sudden illuminations and crises, crossed a rubicon or two, but mostly I'd had the incremental. — Rebecca Solnit

By 2000, the rate of GIS development had risen above the normal growth trend of institutional management skills. This means that systems are now more capable than people, and the ordinary incremental growth rate in skills within an organization does not keep up with developments in technology. Recently, the relative curve of GIS development has leveled off somewhat, but management still has a lot of institutional learning to do before truly making use of the full capabilities of GIS. — Roger Tomlinson

The value any business creates, listed or not, is determined by the rate at which it deploys incremental capital. And — Lawrence A. Cunningham

Like the battleships of old, omnibus programs present too tempting a target, too easily destroyed by a single attack, to make it through a fight ... It is through incremental change after change, step after step, that a statesman of today can vindicate a bold vision. — Dick Morris

Evolution and incremental change is important and we need it, but we're desperate for real revolution and that requires a different type of courage and creativity. — Brene Brown

I wanted fame, but I thought it would be incremental, and I became afraid of the overnight-sensation thing. — Wes Bentley

I love writing in compressed time periods because the act of survival in the midst of panic and fear, that's where true heroism comes. If you have a uniform, and you're expected to do things, it's a sort of incremental heroism. — Peter Landesman

In most organizations, change comes in only two flavors: trivial and traumatic. Review the history of the average organization and you'll discover long periods of incremental fiddling punctuated by occasional bouts of frantic, crisis-driven change. — Gary Hamel

Open source isn't about saving money, it's about doing more stuff, and getting incremental innovation with the finite budget you have. — Jim Whitehurst

Make incremental progress, change comes not by the yard, but by the inch. — Rick Pitino

The most important form of incremental change is the decision by the individual to become vegan. Veganism, or the eschewing of all animal products, is more than a matter of diet or lifestyle; it is a political and moral statement in which the individual accepts the principle of abolition in her own life. Veganism is the one truly abolitionist goal that we can all achieve-and we can achieve it immediately, starting with our next meal. — Gary L. Francione

Where recyling takes place only in response to political pressures and exhortations, it need not meet the test of being incrementally worth its incremental costs. Accordingly, studies of government-imposed recycling programs in the United States have shown that what they salvage is usually worth less than the cost of salvaging it. — Thomas Sowell

Certain barriers do require a critical mass of action at the right time to overcome the inertia that is greater than incremental change. — David Jaber

Inner Awareness is often gained in incremental steps at first. The distraction of the perceived physical world dictates this. However, once one realizes this process, a new skill in "awareness recognition" emerges ... and like riding a bike for the first time, one peddles faster, gaining confidence in their new skill, a skill that will take them much farther than any distraction previously experienced — Gary Hopkins

The beauty of agile comes in with its incremental nature and use of empiricism to focus on three "I"s - Interaction, Iteration, and Improvement. — Pearl Zhu