TENTANG EPISODE INI
Book Launch: What Happens When You Are Not in the Room by Jon Berger
What Happens When You Are Not In The Room?
Anne Currie welcomes back mission critical software delivery expert Jon Berger for a book launch conversation about leadership, management, and strategy. This episode focuses on the hard-won lessons behind Jon’s new book, why he wrote it, and the practical models he uses to think about whether leadership is actually working.
We discuss what it means to lead well in different contexts, how to reduce the pain that poor leadership creates, and why the most important measure of success is what happens when you are not in the room.
Key topics
- Anne introduces the episode as a book launch conversation with Jon Berger, her irregular co-host and a tech veteran with 30 years of leadership experience.
- Jon shares that his book, What Happens When You Are Not In the Room, is about leadership, management, and strategy as tools, not a single magic answer.
- The conversation centers on the idea that leadership is often about pain:
- pain experienced by leaders
- pain experienced by teams
- pain caused by poor management and poor delivery
- Jon explains that he wrote the book to capture lessons from his own career, including times when he led well and poorly, and to help others avoid repeating the same mistakes.
- He describes how training, coaching, and teaching leaders across his organization gave him a broader view than his own experience alone.
- Anne and Jon discuss why the book title is a question rather than an instruction:
- success is measured by what happens when you are not in the room
- leadership is about influencing others, not doing the work yourself
- context matters, so a single fixed answer is rarely enough
- Jon outlines the kinds of ideas in the book:
- stories that illustrate problems and solutions
- questions leaders should ask
- models for thinking more clearly about context
- loops that help people make decisions and get unstuck
- Jon highlights the car model as a simple way to assess leadership:
- motivation is the engine and gas
- strategy is the steering
- bottlenecks are often the brake
Anne points to the followability model as another useful framework, especially the distinction between:
- whether people want to follow you
- whether they are actually able to follow you right now
The discussion emphasizes that good leadership starts by recognizing where teams really are, including when they are “in a hole,” before pushing them toward a vision.
Anne closes by praising the book as practical, self-aware, and useful for anyone trying to lead teams and deliver difficult work better.
