Book review: What Happens When You Are Not In The Room? by Jon Berger

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 tale of his journey, that of all the folk that went along with him, and everything they learned on the way is surprisingly warm and heartfelt. He repeatedly praises psychological safely - the idea that managers should encourage an environment where folk feel capable of admitting their failures - and he walks that walk in his own book.

Alongside a tonne of useful models and observations, the main lesson you'll take away from What Happens When You Are Not In The Room is "it depends". The book contains a whole toolbox of techniques you can use to align teams and organisations to deliver successfully but unfortunately, as the author points out in chapter one, there isn't just one that works every time in every scenario. Life isn't that easy. 

Reading this book was easy though, so at least that was good news.

What Happens When You Are Not In The Room? By Jon Berger will be available in paperback from 1st September 2026

Full disclosure, I was an editor of this book.