Bottleneck

We all know what a 'bottleneck' is. The word brings back couple of interesting thoughts to mind(atleast mine).

First is the 'Molecular Thermodynamics' in chemistry during my 11th grade.(God I hate the subject - it is for people with good memory and only for those people). It had something to do with Le Chatelier's principle and roughly translated it goes like 'the rate of the reaction will be determined by the rate of its slowest step'

The example, given at that time, was - no matter the speed at which you walk down from your seat at movie theater to the exit door - the speed at which you can pass through the door is still constrained by the slowest speed at which people pass through the door (conversely, the door can allow to pass through).

Second one was more recently by Peter Drucker in 'Practise of Management'. He says that there is saying (age-old) that the bottleneck is always at the top - however, he uses that to indict the 'top most management' as the bottle neck.

Do you feel anything that rings the bell when you say the word 'bottleneck' ? ofcourse not the rate at which you can drink coke out of a bottle ;p