Upmodded for giving me lots to chew on :)

I have not read the book, so take this rant with as much salt as you like. Anyways, here goes:

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”

I had trouble reading past this, because of another similar law:

The world is divided into two types of people: those who divide the world into two types of people, and those who do not.

I can tell already that I'm going to have trouble with this guy. But sure, I can see that in a social hierarchy, the higher up your position is the more your knowledge is about the dynamics of the organization itself rather than the details of implementing the organization's goals. Still, a good leader or manager should maintain some awareness of what's going on in the trenches in order to make good executive decisions. They don't have to know every little detail, but it seems unwise to consider your employees as a single black box that magically produces goods and services.

First Law of Advice: “the correct advice given is the advice that is desired”

Does this guy think he's a Zen master or something? Does this mean that it is desired to give the correct advice, or correct to give the desired advice? A cynical person could read this as "If you have multiple choices for an answer to give, you should choose the one they want to hear, regardless of its actual correctness." Oy. My head hurts when I try to parse this First Law of Advice.

Second Law of Advice: “the desired advice is revealed by the structure of the organization, not by the structure of the technology”

Uh oh. This is starting to sound like Putt is leaning towards the cynical interpretation of the First Law. Wait, maybe he's just saying that you should pay attention to what the organization is already doing and frame your answer in those terms. If the local elementary school asks me what they can do to help the environment, I probably shouldn't tell them to limit industrial consumption of nonrenewable resources. A school recycling program might be easier for their organization to manage. Or maybe not. Kids can do some freaky things when they put their minds to it.

Third Law of Advice: “Simple advice is the best advice”

Hey, something I agree with! Simple as possible, but no simpler, right?

Consultant's Law: “The value to a consultant of each discussion is proportional to the information he receives, independent of any information he may give in return,”

Not going to argue with this one, except to say that it applies to every participant in the discussion, not just consultants.

Corollary to the Consultant's Law: “A successful consultant never gives as much information to his clients as he gets in return.”

My increasingly cynical take on this is that the most successful consultant (or other participant, as noted above) is the one who gets information while contributing absolutely nothing to a discussion. The trouble is this: if everybody held to this concept of never getting more than you get out of a discussion, then meetings would become these horrendous time sinks where nobody discusses anything of value whatsoever.

So obviously Putt's Corollary is almost universally followed in business.

Fourth Law of Decision Making: “Technical analyses have no value above the midmanagement level

Doesn't it depend on the impact of the analysis? Sure, a relatively minor tehnical change which doesn't affect the "black box" production of goods and services may not need to trouble the pretty little minds of the executives who are obviously too busy getting the answers they want to hear and attending meetings where nobody contributes anything, but an active executive should muster up a casual interest if somebody has just presented an analysis of how much more productive the company would be if they outsourced all the labor to fuzzy kittens in the Third World. Obviously, the presenter of that particular analysis is insane and off his meds, but still.

Putt may be right, but the insular, hierarchy-driven, and probably incompetent organization described by these laws is not a place where I want to work. Maybe I'm in an excessively critical mood today, and Putt's own interpretations of his laws are much more benign than what I saw. I should see if my library has a copy of this book.