Bureaucrat

"You know, in a huge organization like the university, most of the things - including the fate of many so-called important people - are hold in the hands of bureaucrats." J continued after a moment of silence.

"I can understand that," I nodded.

"The irony is, unfortunately, all these bureaucrats who run the entire institute are junior staffs and have neither a trace of common sense nor the necessary knowledge of the field. They keep making silly decisions that turn out to be tragedies," my friend went on.

I know exactly what he means. Not too long ago I personally encountered a lovely creature who planned to put up student rota so that they attach to a different ward each day - and sometimes one ward in the morning, a second in the afternoon, then a third the next day. Our provident funds are possibly under the care of some mollusks that have never read Graham and Dodd's Security Analysis. As my friend MF used to say, bureaucrats are the neck of our organization: It governs the information going to the top, and, by all probability, control the movement of the head.

They are the bottleneck.