IN MILAN ON A RAINY SUNDAY MORNING, MARCH 23, 1919, A FEW dozen angry men crowded into a muggy meeting room of the Industrial and Commercial Alliance in Piazza San Sepolcro. After hours of talk, they stood, clasped hands, and pledged their readiness “to kill or die” in defense of Italy against all enemies. To dramatize their unity, they chose for their emblem the fasces, a bundle of elm rods coupled with an ax that in ancient times had represented the power wielded by a Roman consul. The manifesto they signed bore just fifty-four names, and their foray into electoral politics that autumn was barely noticed, but within a couple of years the Fascist movement had more than two thousand chapters, and Benito Mussolini was their leader.
Unlike a monarchy or a military dictatorship imposed on society from above, Fascism draws energy from men and women who are upset because of a lost war, a lost job, a memory of humiliation, or a sense that their country is in steep decline. The more painful the grounds for resentment, the easier it is for a Fascist leader to gain followers by dangling the prospect of renewal or by vowing to take back what has been stolen.
Fascism should perhaps be viewed less as a political ideology than as a means for seizing and holding power. For example, Italy in the 1920s included self-described Fascists of the left (who advocated a dictatorship of the dispossessed), of the right (who argued for an authoritarian corporatist state), and of the center (who sought a return to absolute monarchy). The German National Socialist Party (the Nazis) originally came together around a list of demands that catered to anti-Semites, anti-immigrants, and anti-capitalists but also advocated for higher old-age pensions, more educational opportunities for the poor, an end to child labor, and improved maternal health care. The Nazis were racists and, in their own minds, reformers at the same time.
Before we discuss queues, we must introduce a little vocabulary. When we describe queueing systems, we refer to the queue, which is the waiting work, and the server, which is the resource performing the work. The pattern with which work arrives, which is usually unpredictable, is known as the arrival process. The time it takes the server to accomplish the work may also be unpredictable. This is known as the service process. We handle waiting work in a certain sequence, such as first-in-first-out (FIFO). This sequence is known as the queueing discipline.
product development has asymmetric economic payoff-functions. Not all deviations have negative economic consequences. Because product developers encounter unexpected opportunities, conformance to plan may not represent the best economic choice. Our control system must enable us to exploit unexpected opportunities by increasing the deviation from the original plan whenever this creates economic value.
We want to control measures of performance that have strong influence on economic success. We can identify these parameters using the economic framework discussed in Chapter 3. If a 10 percent increase in project expenses reduces profits by 1 percent, and a 10 percent increase in unit cost reduces profits by 50 percent, we should focus our attention on controlling unit cost, not project expenses.
