Putt’s Law states that 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.
Its corollary is unsettling: every technical hierarchy, in time, develops a competence inversion. The people who understand the work get pushed towards doing it. The people who cannot understand it rise to manage it.
Archibald Putt published this in 1976. Fifty years later, it is still being validated, daily, in organisations everywhere.
The Inversion Is Personal, Not Structural
The easy reading is organisational: the system promotes incompetence, the hierarchy inverts, nothing to be done. This is comfortable: it removes agency, the structure did it, it’s impossible to avoid.
The harder reading is more accurate. The inversion is personal. It happens one comfortable decision at a time: you stop reading pull requests because you trust the team. You skip the architecture deep-dive because you have a department to run. You watch a recorded demo at 1.5x instead of attending the build review in person because your calendar is full. Each decision is individually defensible. Each one moves you a little further away from understanding what you are supposed to be leading.
Nobody announces the day they stopped caring about how things work. It accumulates beneath the surface, disguised at every step as professional maturity. The quiet surrender is indistinguishable from seniority. Later, much later, it suddenly is not.
The Same Failure, Inverted
The opposite failure is just as common, and almost never named.
There are technical people who never learn to manage work, defining themselves by their understanding of the task, treating everything else — stakeholder communication, team dynamics, the patient and often frustrating work of developing people — as someone else’s problem. It reads as intellectual integrity. It is the same surrender, from the other direction.
Putt’s Law Describes a Default, Not a Destiny
The law is often read as a taxonomy: two types of people, fixed and distinct. To me it describes two types of outcome for the same person — the professional who, at some stage, stops developing one half of the equation. Assuming that these two competences are in competition is wrong. It is also self-fulfilling if you believe it.
The leaders worth trusting over the long run are rarely the ones who mastered either side. They are the ones who never decided the other side was someone else’s job.
What It Actually Takes
Staying on the right side of Putt’s divide is about maintaining the instinct to understand how things actually work — and the deliberate stubbornness to keep learning, practicing and building things.
For me, this has meant setting up a complex homelab, creating side projects that ship nothing but teach everything, and being the first — and for a while the heaviest — user of new tools before bringing them to the business. When agentic AI arrived, I went deep before I pushed it to my teams: not to stay ahead of a trend: to ensure that that when I did introduce it, I could do so with genuine context. Knowing the failure modes, where quality and productivity gains are real and where not. That kind of credibility cannot be borrowed.
That is also an intentional management act. Introducing a new capability to an organisation in a way that creates real change — rather than generating noise and failing — requires understanding it well. Technical proficiency and organisational leadership, operating as one thing.
The same discipline applied to the other side. Learning to manage well is not something that just happens through exposure. It requires study: frameworks like situational leadership and radical candour, practices like structured one-on-ones and deliberate feedback loops, and the willingness to treat your own leadership as something to be actively improved rather than accumulated.
Neither half is optional. These skills compound or they atrophy.
The Cost Worth Paying
Staying broadly capable is not free. It requires time you could spend elsewhere, tolerance for systems that break at inconvenient hours, and a willingness to look like you are distracted when you are actually maintaining something important.
The alternative is a gradual narrowing that feels, at every step, entirely reasonable. Each individual surrender is defensible. The cumulative effect is Putt’s Law, in slow motion.
The inversion is not inevitable. It is a choice — usually made by not choosing at all.
Putt’s Law and the Successful Technocrat was first published in 1981. The author wrote under a pseudonym.
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