Let s say that we re happy, for the meantime, with a chain that can carry a load of one hundred pounds. But we are unhappy with, the maintenance costs that accompany our nine heavy link chain that is now a lean efficient collection of precisely tuned links that give us our desired level of performance for the least cost. We want to rightsize our chain. Therefore, we sell the nine heavy links and replace the at some expense with nine finely tuned specimens that precisely match the load carrying capacity of the one remaining link. Now we have a truly efficient chain.
Every link is capable of carrying exactly the same lead, with no costly over capacity.
We have virtually locked ourselves into the current level of performance. Before undertaking our cost-cutting program, we had only one weak link that limited the performance of our chain to one hundred pounds. We have ten constraints. When, in the future, we will find it necessary to improve the performance of out chain, we will have no choice but to improve all ten links. We will have no choice but to undo all that our earlier cost-cutting efforts achieved.