Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Big Swings vs. Incremental Changes 3-29-25
Sat, 29 Mar 2025
In this episode, Scott Becker explores the concept of making big, “left of the decimal point” changes versus small, “right of the decimal point” improvements.
Chapter 1: Who is Scott Becker and what is this podcast about?
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. Today's discussion is a topic that we talk about in different ways a lot, but inspired today by an article published, I saw it in LinkedIn, called Lessons from a Bag of Doritos. And it's really a discussion of Roger Enrico. For those that don't know, this is before the time of many people.
Chapter 2: What is the concept behind 'Lessons from a Bag of Doritos'?
He was the CEO of Pepsi earlier on, the leader of Doritos and so forth. And the concept is this is really a discussion of big swings versus incremental changes. And they talk about in this article things that are to the right of the decimal point versus the left of the decimal point. And management versus leadership. And so bear with me for a second as I try to explain this.
Chapter 3: What are incremental changes or 'right of the decimal point' improvements?
I thought it was a brilliant piece by a guy named James Cain, Lessons from a Bag of Doritos. But the concept is this. Most of us go through life, at least many of us, trying to make small adaptions, small incremental changes. And this would be the concept of right to the decimal point.
And the concept of the article is, so if you're looking at 1.3, this is not changing the 1, but trying to change the 0.3 to 0.4 to 0.5. that would become incrementalist.
Chapter 4: Can you provide examples of incremental improvements?
You know, try and move the net worth up a little bit, try and move the weight down a little bit, try and get a little bit better at what we're doing in terms of the podcast being ranked number one at the Apple Business News, try and spend a little bit more time developing podcasts, try and do a little bit more money on marketing the podcast and distributing it and so forth and so on.
And also be incremental changes, constant incremental changes, trying to move revenue from $60 million to $61 million, whatever it is, whatever business you're in, this looking at incremental changes. In tennis, it might be getting to be a little bit better at my backhand. And so the concept being here, as opposed to incremental changes, looking at right of the decimal point changes,
Chapter 5: What does it mean to make 'left of the decimal point' or big swing changes?
Looking at left of the decimal point changes. And to go off this concept, how can you double the distribution in your podcast? What would that take? How can you make yourself a much better tennis player? What would that take? It probably wouldn't. take an incremental improvement in my backhand, it probably means losing 10 pounds and being a lot faster and playing with a lot more energy.
That would be a left of the decimal point change versus a right of the decimal point change. Similarly, it would be looking at things as how do I make what I think about from the Dan Sullivan story of writing and is how do you make 10x changes versus 2x changes? How do you make big, big improvements versus small, small improvements?
And the concept is, and the article is, that leadership is about looking at not just management and execution and making right of the decimal point changes and small improvements, but how do you also look at making big changes, bigger changes that are left of the decimal point changes? How do you sort of get there? And I love this concept. And for me, it's a constant reminder.
I am such by nature an executor and a blocker and tackler that the reminder to periodically look at things from a 10x perspective, a bigger perspective versus a smaller perspective of how to make big changes to what I'm doing versus small changes to what I'm doing. is really, for me, a fantastic reminder. It's not something I'm naturally good at, to look at it that way versus the other way.
So that's today's discussion, looking at bigger changes versus smaller changes, looking at essentially the concept of right of the decimal point versus left of the decimal point. And here's the idea of trying to go for left of the decimal point changes. Like, for example, if I see somebody doing push-ups, I think,
Not to do five push-ups, but can they go left at the decimal point, make a much bigger difference by going after 50 push-ups? What's the way to make a much bigger change versus a smaller change? Left at the decimal point versus right at the decimal point.
It would be if I see somebody brushing their hair, rather than proving their hair, can they change their hair from brown to blonde to make it a big, big difference? Left at the decimal point versus right at the decimal point. Thank you for listening to the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. I say facetiously a little bit about the brunette to blonde.
In any event, thank you for listening to the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast.
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