A.E. Currie Blog

I always like a book title that's a question. It's very Agatha Christie.  In his funny management book (something I might once have considered a contradiction in terms), old hand tech leader and engineer Jon Berger makes the case that all of management and leadership boils down to one key question, "What Happens When You Are Not In The Room?"  The "you" in question is the frantic person trying to work out why their project is not delivering the way they wanted it to. In the book, that poor unfortunate would-be leader and manager is Jon Berger himself throughout his long career progressing from hapless junior manager at a small software development company to senior engineering leader at Microsoft.  He illustrates his advice and observations using the real world results of his own trial and error attempts at building organisations that created and shipped complex, difficult products. The entertaining bits are generally what went horribly wrong.  The implicit ...