Tunnels are passive, people are creative. Adding a second tunnel doesn’t require interplay from the first. Adding a company of people is subject to whatever the sociological equivalent is of Amdahl’s law, whereby there is extra overhead to coordinating their work with your current employees, and don’t forget cultural integration.

I wouldn't exactly say running a 100 yard dash is creative.

Let me ask you this: why do we run 100 yard dashes? (If you'll allow, I'm going to ask you up to four more whys, maybe we'll find out something interesting!)

Because your tunnel is not competing against a superior, dominant tunnel.

EDIT: Also, the runner and eagle analogy seam to criticize the line of thinking that would lead people to assume you can just smash together two companies and end up with a company that is better than the current market leaders. The tube analogy doesn't touch on that at all..

> assume you can just smash together two companies and end up with a company that is better than the current market leaders

But you can. Think of regional phone companies (the baby bells), which merged and became dominant just by dent of natural monopoly.

Anyway, my analogy is exactly the opposite of that critique. It's the optimist's view (which is also the view of the decision-makers at the companies, so it's not to be dismissed easily).

> you can just smash

I think you may have glossed over the "just". Of course they "can" but it's not "ergo" in the sense that 1 + 1 = 2 ergo you are now better than the 1.5 company.

I don't view the tunnel as being the optimistic antithesis of the turkey or runner analogy. The other two are not meant to be postulations pending mathematical proofs but critiques on simplistic thinking.