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 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 from hapless junior manager at a small software development company in London 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 implied tale of his journey, that of all the good folk that went along with him, and everything they learned on the way is surprisingly warm and heartfelt. He's a big fan of psychological safety - the idea of encouraging an environment where folk feel OK to admit their failures - and he walks that walk in his own book.

Alongside a tonne of useful models and observations, the main lesson you 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 technique 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.

5*

What Happens When You Are Not In The Room? By Jon Berger is available on Amazon is all regions (Buy on Amazon UK, Buy on Amazon US)

Full disclosure, I was an editor of this book and one of the folk that took the bumpy journey with him.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Panopticon Series Goes Open - Utopia Five Will Become Free To Read

Image
Radically Open "persuasive possible future history of how climate change, surveillance and society could play out for us over the next 40 years, and a great detective page-turner as well."  - Amazon review Utopia Five After six years, I have finally decided to open my Panopticon scifi series under a creative commons license friendly to the 'bots. (BY-NC) On September 12th 2025, Utopia Five, the first of the Panopticon series, gets a CC release . The 9 book series will conclude with the finale, Shadow Earth, which will be released in early 2026. Give my novels away for free? Have I lost my mind? Show Me The Money The Panopticon series is a set of scifi/clifi/solarpunk mysteries and thrillers based in an alternative history near-future where the world becomes radically open - a panopticon. "an unexpectedly deep and conceptual sci-fi techno thriller" - Amazon review Utopia Five It has sold thousands of copies on Amazon  and I had always one day hoped to make it ava...
Read more

About Utopia Five (With No Spoilers!)

Image
I’m doing my first book club chat this month on Utopia Five and I’m about to release a new edit. All of that has made me think back on the original idea: what if you had a computer game that simulated reality well enough to make changes in the past and see the result? How would you make something like that? For starters, you’d need a heck of a lot of data: 100% world camera coverage. Second, I decided the data would have to be public. I wanted the game invented by a person, not Google. So, I introduced an Open Panopticon in 2025 and the story takes place thirty years later.  The title of Utopia Five is a hat tip to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five - the protagonists of both can time travel in their own lifetime. Lee Sands was born the day the Panopticon was turned on and the game is a virtual time machine, which sees back to that moment and no further. I was worried I’d laid that reference on a bit thick, but nobody seemed to notice, demonstrating that authors don’t have a clue ...
Read more

My new book "Building Green Software" from O'Reilly

Image
As well as writing SciFi, I also write non-fiction books and my most recent is Building Green Software from O'Reilly Media.  People often ask how writing non-fiction and fiction books differ. The answer is both utterly and hardly at all. I had to research Building Green Software extensively, but I also research my science fiction books. I even used some of the same reviewers. (Well, one!)  A thriller has to be page turning and you need to consider pace, but I would argue that is equally true of a non-fiction book. When you write any book, you have to plan how you will persuade readers to keep reading it. A plot keeps folk reading your novels, but why not use the same techniques for non-fiction?
Read more