''Putt's Law and the Successful Technocrat'' is a book, credited to the

pseudonym A pseudonym (; ) or alias () is a fictitious name that a person or group assumes for a particular purpose, which differs from their original or true name (orthonym). This also differs from a new name that entirely or legally replaces an individua ...

Archibald Putt, published in 1981. An updated edition, subtitled ''How to Win in the Information Age'', was published by Wiley-IEEE Press in 2006. The book is based upon a series of articles published in ''Research/Development Magazine'' in 1976 and 1977. It proposes Putt's Law and Putt's Corollary which are principles of negative selection similar to

The Dilbert principle The Dilbert principle is a satirical concept of management developed by Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip ''Dilbert'', which states that companies tend to promote incompetent employees to management to minimize their ability to harm product ...

proposed by

Scott Adams Scott Raymond Adams (born June 8, 1957) is an American author and cartoonist. He is the creator of the syndicated ''Dilbert'' comic strip, and the author of several nonfiction works of satire, commentary, and business. ''Dilbert'' gained nation ...

in the 1990s. Putt's law is sometimes grouped together with the

Peter principle The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter, which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until ...

, Parkinson's Law and

Stephen Potter Stephen Meredith Potter (1 February 1900 – 2 December 1969) was a British writer best known for his parodies of self-help books, and their film and television derivatives. After leaving school in the last months of the First World War he wa ...

Gamesmanship Gamesmanship is the use of dubious (although not technically illegal) methods to win or gain a serious advantage in a game or sport. It has been described as "Pushing the rules to the limit without getting caught, using whatever dubious methods po ...

series as "P-literature".

Putt's Law

The book proposes Putt's Law and Putt's

Corollary In mathematics and logic, a corollary ( , ) is a theorem of less importance which can be readily deduced from a previous, more notable statement. A corollary could, for instance, be a proposition which is incidentally proved while proving another ...

* Putt's Law: "''Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.''"Archibald Putt. ''Putt's Law and the Successful Technocrat: How to Win in the Information Age'', Wiley-IEEE Press (2006), . page 7. * Putt's Corollary: "''Every technical hierarchy, in time, develops a competence inversion.''" with incompetence being "flushed out of the lower levels" of a technocratic hierarchy, ensuring that technically competent people remain directly in charge of the actual technology while those without technical competence move into management.

References

External links

Archibald Putt: The Unknown Technocrat Returns
(spectrum.ieee.org) 1981 non-fiction books 2006 non-fiction books Satirical books Politics and technology Works published under a pseudonym Management books {{management-book-stub