Ben Horowitz's term (from "The Hard Thing About Hard Things") for the accumulated cost of short-term management shortcuts — giving two people the same title, avoiding a hard firing, promising a promotion you can't keep. Like technical debt, management debt compounds quietly: it costs nothing today and everything later, usually in a form you can't easily name. For a founder-CEO running a small team, the most useful question is "which of my current management choices are actually just debt I'm deferring?"