A great post from Ben Horowitz on a new concept he calls management debt:

Like technical debt, management debt is incurred when you make an expedient, short-term management decision with an expensive, long-term consequence. Also like technical debt, the trade-off sometimes makes sense, but often does not. More importantly, if you incur the management debt without accounting for it, then you will eventually go management bankrupt.

If you’re running a small company, this post is well worth a read.