When you think of domino, you may envision a chain reaction where one piece tips over another and leads to more until the whole line falls in an elegant cascade. This is the “domino effect,” and it’s also a metaphor for any action that causes a sequence of events to follow—from building a house to writing a novel to running a marathon.
Lily Hevesh started playing with dominoes when she was 9. Her grandparents had a 28-pack, and she loved setting them up in straight or curved lines and flicking them. As she grew older, her collection grew and she started posting videos of her creations online. Soon, she had a million YouTube followers and a career as a professional domino artist.
Dominoes are square ceramic tiles that feature a line in the middle and a value on both ends, either a number of dots (called pips) or blank spaces. Each end is printed in a different color, and the pips are raised above the tile so they’re easy to spot. Most sets have double-six dominoes, but there are many other variations, including double-nine, double-12, double-18 and even double-21. Increasing the number of pips on each end increases the total value of the tiles, making a set more difficult to play.
The word domino comes from the Latin dominium, which means “heave or sway.” It’s believed that the game of domino came to Europe from Turkey around the 17th century. The word and the game have since grown to become a popular pastime worldwide.
Like dominoes, business models are complex and require careful planning. To build a successful model, you need to have the right team, an effective strategy and the tools to support your vision. And, you must be able to make changes as your organization grows and evolves.
A good business model can help you navigate these challenges, but it’s important to be able to visualize your model so you know how it will change over time. And, if you’re going to create a model that will be used by your team, you need a platform that allows everyone to access the information and results in the same way.
Domino delivers a single, unified Domino server for code and data, allowing you to run your model as a self-service web application and track the links between a result and the source code or data that created it. With Domino, you can scale your Domino deployment to fit your needs, whether you want to use on-premises hardware, a private cloud or hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure.
Physicist Stephen Morris explains that standing a domino upright gives it potential energy, or stored energy based on its position. Once you knock over the first domino, much of this potential energy is converted into kinetic energy, or the energy of motion, and the chain reaction begins. Dominoes are more powerful than you think. A 1983 study by University of British Columbia physicist Lorne Whitehead demonstrated that they can knock down objects about a foot tall—that’s the same size as a Tic Tac.