Fourth Law of Decision Making: “Technical analyses have no value above the midmanagement level As an Engineer, this is shocking to me. But having talked with an expert in marketing , it seems that Putt might be right. What are your thoughts on that?

To me I think most senior managers see no value in technical analyses. In fact the senior managers may be right to a degree.

Just as good system design should hide how the lower levels really work, good management should hide how the lower downs really work. I mean, unless I had a senior manager who had a lot of programming experience I'd probably be rather miffed if he or she questioned my code all the time, unless my code was bad and broke stuff.

Both a completely laissez faire attitude and micromanagement from above are wrong, but a little balance should yield a lot of success.

However, if a technical analysis has monetary value attached/embedded, I would say senior management would care a lot more. e.g. If I as a developer saw a big mess of code that I had to support, and thought, 'man, I need to clean this up, but it's going to take some time away from another project' even my one-above manager should tell me not to clean it up unless the cost saving is significantly more than the money to be made/saved from the other project.