Your business is a flow system
Pipelines, funnels, throughput — business language is already fluid dynamics, and the physics transfers. In any flow system, total throughput is set by the narrowest constriction, and improving anything except the bottleneck changes nothing.
The operational discipline that follows is measurement before optimization. A physicist doesn't guess where the constriction is; they measure flow at each stage. The business equivalent — instrumenting every funnel step before touching any of them — routinely reveals that the 'obvious' problem stage is fine and an unglamorous step is quietly throttling everything.
Friction is a design decision
Physical friction converts useful motion into waste heat; interface friction converts customer intent into abandonment. Both are real, measurable and directional. Every extra form field, load second and confirmation screen dissipates some fraction of the intent that arrived at it. Cutting checkout friction is the commercial equivalent of lubricating a bearing — the input energy (traffic, ad spend) stays the same while useful output rises.
Sometimes you want more of it: confirmations before destructive actions, deliberate slowness in irreversible decisions.
The AI race is a thermodynamics race
Modern AI progress has a physical substrate: converting energy into computation into intelligence. Training frontier models is measured in gigawatt-hours; inference costs are energy costs; data-center siting is now a question of grid capacity and cooling — heat rejection, the oldest problem in thermodynamics. The efficiency chain from power plant to chip to useful token is the real supply curve of intelligence.
This yields a genuinely physical strategic lens: the person, company or country that converts energy into intelligence most efficiently holds a compounding advantage. You can engineer around almost anything; thermodynamics is not one of them.
For an operator, the practical takeaway scales down: know your energy-to-output ratio. Whether it's cost per computed token, per delivered parcel or per acquired customer, the physics habit of tracking input-to-useful-output efficiency — and knowing your theoretical floor — is what first-principles thinking actually means in business.