this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2025
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Apparently a page from an internal IBM training manual. Some further attempts at source it

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[–] Corbin@programming.dev 1 points 3 weeks ago

This is too facile. First, in terms of capability maturity, management is not the goal of a fully-realized line of industry. Instead, the end is optimization, a situation where everything is already repeatable, defined, and managed; in this situation, our goal is to increase, improve, and simplify our processes. In stark contrast, management happens prior to those goals; the goal of management is to predict, control, and normalize processes.

Second, management is the only portion of a business which is legible to the government. The purpose of management is to be taxable, accountable, and liable, not to handle the day-to-day labors of the business. The Iron Law insists that the business will divide all employees into the two camps of manager and non-manager based solely on whether they are employed in pursuit of this legibility.

Third, consider labor as prior to employment; after all, sometimes people do things of their own cognizance without any manager telling them what to do. So, everybody is actually a non-manager at first! It's only in the presence of businesses that we have management, and only in the presence of capitalism that we have owners. Consider that management inherits the same issues of top-down command-and-control hierarchy as ownership or landlording.