Administration is part of what management do but it's a little demeaning to suggest that it's all that they do. Done right it should be closer to enabling and informing.
But I'll take it that it's a slightly exaggerated position to make people think about things differently which is fine.
Your word choices of 'enabling' and 'informing' suggest that the manager inherently has holds concentrated power and information and must dole it out where appropriate. That implicitly makes the manager a bottleneck.
Indeed, the word 'management' itself connotes a perspective incompatible with Joel's philosophy.
By enabling I mean the act of creating an environment that enables people to do good work. I've always like the metaphor that a project is like a truck and the role of the project manager is to keep the road clear. That's what I mean by enabling.
In terms of informing, I wasn't wild about the word but couldn't find anything better quickly. Where I was coming from is that in many cases developers and technicians don't have knowledge of the market, don't have much interest in liaising directly with customers and so on. That information should be fed back into the team and customers and others outside the technical team should have a voice which is another function one of the manager should provide.
I've always seen management in an ideal world as a peer role with different responsibilities.
Administration is part of what management do but it's a little demeaning to suggest that it's all that they do. Done right it should be closer to enabling and informing.
But I'll take it that it's a slightly exaggerated position to make people think about things differently which is fine.