It would be so much better for you if all you ever read was my column. Maybe the Bible. Nothing else.

You might read something else that seems informative and interesting – and before you know it, your life would be a living hell.

For instance, I’m worried some of you might have read about the recent Opinion Research poll that asked workers what “small perks” they want from the boss – the modest stuff that would show how much the company loves you, despite the way Human Resources acts.

The survey found that half the workers wanted free soda and water; 43 percent wanted a casual dress day each week; 40 percent wanted free gourmet coffee and tea; a third wanted free snacks; a fifth of them wanted doughnuts at meetings.

Do you see the problem? Without proper perspective and analysis, you might well be so excited by those polling results that you would run into the boss’s office and demand all those things at the same time – especially the doughnuts and the flowered rayon shirts on Fridays.

Your boss would label you a disgruntled lunatic, which is a skill set appropriate only for internal auditors.

In the warm embrace of this column, you would have learned that incremental begging is the way to go for most goals and objectives. For instance, how do you think I obtained that barrel of rum that sits on my desk in the newsroom? First, I asked for a bottle of Diet Coke.

Ask the boss for one casual Friday a month in June, July and August. Wait a few months. Schedule an early-morning meeting on a subject the boss is going to love. Invite him to the meeting. Have doughnuts. Tell him how much the doughnuts seemed to help move things along. Discuss it over coffee. Expensive coffee. See how it works?

Bit By Bit

The incremental approach is well suited not only for company politics, but for public policy as well. If President Obama had been incremental with health reform, he could have sneaked in that stuff about the Death Panels in year three or four, without much of a fuss.

Massachusetts offered up a fine example of the incremental at work when the legislature passed a trigger-lock law requiring the locks on guns kept in homes. The state was not inclined to launch a major legal battle over the Second Amendment and the “right to bear arms.”

The trigger-lock thing did not seem to most folks an effort by despots in state government to disarm the citizenry; it seemed an incremental thing that attempted to avoid having little kids at risk in their homes. The Supreme Judicial Court upheld the law last month.

The pro-gun folks have been successful in some states, including Massachusetts, in creating “Castle Doctrine” legislation that offers up clear protection for homeowners who shoot bad guys invading, well, you know, the castle. Another victory for the incremental approach – as opposed to demanding that gun ownership should be deregulated.

The anti-gun folks successfully defended their incremental approach in Libertarian-flavored New Hampshire this year, when an effort to repeal a ban on guns in the State House was turned back. The prohibition on pistol-packing mommas in the legislative building was perceived by most folks to be reasonable – hardly an assault on the heart and soul of the right to bear arms.

The incremental approach to public policy isn’t a tool reserved only for gun debates. The best practitioners of late have been the anti-abortion forces, which have stepped back from a national effort to ban abortion – and instead, have gone the incremental route.

State-by-state, little battles have been launched over such issues as mandatory counseling for women requesting abortions; mandatory reporting to parents of abortion requests from young girls; and anything else the pro-life folks can dream up to appear reasonable – or, at least, incremental – in a non-nutty sort of way.

Those who attack the incremental approach tend to use the “slippery slope” argument: If the boss gives you doughnuts on Tuesday and casual dress on Friday, we’ll go down the slippery slope toward the “Naked Tuesday Pizza Party in the Board Room.”

At least, that’s what happened at The Warren Group.