Pacemaker Principle

He is the one who is governing throughput for the troop as a whole. In fact, whoever is moving the slowest in the troop is the one who will govern throughput.

Therefore, any physical, growing system is going to run into some kind of constraint, sooner or later. That constraint will take the form of a balancing loop that in some way shifts the dominance of the reinforcing loop driving the growth behavior, either by strengthening the outflow or by weakening the inflow.

Thus a great deal of the strength-predicting element of design boils down to a sort of game in which we try to spot the weakest link in a load-bearing system. The more complicated the structure, the more difficult and unreliable this becomes.

Messages in the sending host’s buffers, waiting for links to clear, were like patrons in a restaurant waiting for tables; RFNMs were the equivalent of the maître d’s announcing “Your table is ready.” This meant it was impossible to send a continuous stream of messages over any single link through the system from one host to another.

The expected time to complete a new task approaches infinity as a team’s utilization approaches 100 percent, and most teams have many dependencies on other teams. Together, these facts mean you can often slow a team down by shifting resources to it, because doing so creates new upstream constraints.

The night garde-manger man, Angel, who looks like he's twelve but sports a tattoo of a skull impaled with a dagger on his chest (future wife-beater, I think) is falling behind; he's got three raviolis, two duck confits, five green salads, two escargots, two Belgian endive and Stilton salads, two cockles, a smoked salmon and blini, two foie gras and a pate working-and the saute and grill stations are calling for urgent vegetable sides and mashed potatoes. I swing the pastry commis over to Angel's station to help out, but there's so little room, they just bump into each, getting in each other's way.

A final reason is that Iran holds what might be a trump card – the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf through which passes each day, depending on sales, about 20 per cent of the world’s oil needs. At its narrowest point the Strait, which is regarded as the most strategic in the world, is only 21 miles across. The industrialised world fears the effect of Hormuz being closed possibly for months on end, with ensuing spiralling prices.

Most concerning to both the Pentagon and Wall Street was a deal Beijing negotiated for control of the Strait of Hormuz. One of the world’s most important international waterways, this narrow chokepoint is the only passageway for liquefied natural gas and petroleum tankers traveling from ports in Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Iran to the open ocean.

Oil, with its price inelasticity, does the opposite. Any sudden change in supply or demand rapidly ripples throughout the entire system.