The formalisation of these ideas started with queuing theory in the early 1900s to help analyse the first 'mega'-scale applications of the 20th century, for example in sizing telephone networks (how many calls are likely to be connected at any one time?), and later on in the 20s to analyse the first huge production plants. looking at metrics of efficiency that are too narrow, ignoring the cost of inventory, looking for productivity increase where it doesn't matter, etc. In fact I think that this aspect alone justifies buying the book: it really fleshes out all-too-common pitfalls in management routines e.g. The format of the presentation was novel, and even more importantly the description of team dynamics that cause sub-par decision-making is spot-on ('what do you mean that we don't care about the productivity of this machine?'). Some of these ideas from operations management resonate with daily intuition (for example that a chain of processes can only progress as fast as the slowest step), but their ramifications are tricky enough that they deserve a systematic look. The success of this book comes from the ability to popularize to a vast business audience in the services industry (and a growing IT industry) elements that came from previous operations settings such as supply chains and factory plants. This is an immensely successful book (it sold in the millions) that also influenced a number of program and project management methodologies in routine use today (e.g. The protagonist is in a pinch to save his factory (with a side story of marriage crisis), and business operations management ideas are presented during the unfolding of the plot. Goldratt is business book in the style of a thriller, published in 1984. I'm going to re-visit the game and make the constraint explicit, and show exactly which part of the reader's intuition is correct, and which part fails and why. It's an (unstated) constraint (limited inventory) that actually causes the reader's intuition to fail. However, in the (perhaps necessarily quick) presentation and examination of this game, something goes amiss in regards to how the intuition that readers get from the presentation (unconstrained inventory) is *actually correct*.

As the book analyses the outcome of the game, the reader's intuition is quickly shown to be false. The 'die and matchsticks' game is presented in Goldratt's best-seller 'The Goal' as an example of subtle unintuitive behaviours of a pretty general 'chain of workers' system. All the code, numeric results and images related to this post are at Summary

The goal book