Management Quote by Richard Gough

The joke lands because it weaponizes a familiar modern archetype: the person who mistakes constant commentary for competence. "I've got an opinion on everything" isn’t presented as a flaw to correct; it’s treated like a credential, then snapped into place with the smug logic of "so I should go into management". That little "so" is the blade. It parodies the way institutions often reward performative certainty over actual expertise, as if confidence were the same thing as judgment.

The line also has a sly understanding of management as a role defined less by making things than by evaluating, directing, and deciding. If your main output is opinions, management becomes the perfect habitat. The subtext is not just anti-boss; it’s anti-self-importance: the speaker confesses a vanity and immediately rationalizes it as career destiny. Self-awareness becomes part of the punchline, but it doesn’t redeem him; it indicts the system that will still hire him.

Context matters, even if Gough’s exact professional lane is fuzzy. In late 18th-century Britain, bureaucratic expansion and patronage networks were hardening into recognizable hierarchies. "Management" as a word and an idea was drifting toward what we now call administration: oversight, authority, status. The quip reads like a proto-office satire from an era discovering that the people best at talking about work are not always the people best at doing it. It’s timeless because the corporate meeting hasn’t changed much since.