Parv Sondhi tweeted “We’ve all heard of technical debt, but I love this concept of management debt.”
He refers this a passage from the book The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers (2014) by Ben Horowitz:
“Thanks to Ward Cunningham, the computer programmer who designed the first wiki, the metaphor ‘technical debt‘ is now a well-understood concept. While you may be able to borrow time by writing quick and dirty code, you will eventually have to pay it back—with interest. Often this trade-off makes sense, but you will run into serious trouble if you fail to keep the trade-off in the front of your mind. there also exists a less understood parallel concept, which I will call management debt.
Like technical debt, management debt is incurred when you make an expedient, short-term management decision with an expensive long-term consequence. Like technical debt, the trade-off sometimes makes sense, but often does not. More important, if you incur the management debt without accounting for it, then you will eventually go management bankrupt.”
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