This analogy may help clarify some Color Management concepts. 

Disclaimer

Be careful with analogies. They are useful for clarifying a principle but it is always dangerous to dig into them in an effort to discover additional truths about a subject. This analogy is no different. For one thing, the work of the ICC preceded sRGB. I switched the chronology to keep the story shorter.

In the following account, the color management equivalents are [inside square brackets] to make the associations between ideas more obvious.

Bringing Order out of Chaos

Color Management works a lot like an international banking system. Instead of wrestling with all the possible exchange rates (which would be N(N-1)*2 where "N" is the total number of currencies) involving each currency of each participating nation, the bank identifies one currency (or some other negotiable entity such as gold) as a standard and then manages exchange rates between each currency and this standard. When someone wants to exchange an amount in one local currency for the equivalent in another, his amount is first exchanged for an amount of the standard at the prevaling exchange rate and then that amount (of the standard) is used to obtain the equivalent in the second local currency. In this way, only "N" exchange rates must be managed (one between each local currency and the standard).

You could think of the monetary standard in this case as the Profile Connection Space (described in the Introduction) and the local currencies as individual device color spaces. The exchange rates are analogous to the calibration process.