What Happens When You're Not in the Room? - Leadership, Media, and Writing Insights

Book reveal - Jon Berger's new book on leadership and management: What Happens When You Are Not In The Room? comes out on the 1st September.

In this episode, Anne Currie and guest Jon Berger explore the nuances of leadership, the art of writing books, humour in professional communication, and media representations of leadership. They delve into the importance of leading through influence rather than presence, the joys and challenges of authoring, and the relevance of leadership in TV, film, and fiction.

Key Topics:

• The core idea that leadership occurs primarily when you're not in the room

• The significance of influencing others to achieve results

• The concept of leadership at scale versus micro-managing

• Jon Berger’s new book: What Happens When You Are Not In the Room?

• The value of humor and storytelling in professional writing

• Personal reflections on mistakes and learning as a leader

• Leadership as a collective effort, akin to assembling a team or a story

• Leadership lessons drawn from TV shows, films, and books

• The importance of encouraging everyone in an organization to be a leader

• The process and motivation behind writing a book

We'll send you a bonus chapter of the book by signing up at JonBergerLeadership.com

Transcript

**Anne (00:00)**

Hello and welcome to episode 18 of Asynchronous Unreliable, a weekly podcast where we discuss the latest ideas and concepts in tech. I'm your host Anne Currie, co-author of Building Green Software from O'Reilly, the cloud native attitude and author of the science fiction Panopticon series.

And today I'm going to be talking to Jon Berger, kind of an irregular co-host of this podcast, mission critical software veteran and also, as he has announced today, forthcoming author. So welcome back, Jon.

**Jon Berger (00:36)**

Hello again, glad to be back. I'm a big fan of your podcast.

**Anne (00:40)**

Well, you are on it a lot. You're probably my most regular guest. So your book. This is all very exciting. Tell us about your book. What's the name of your book and what's it about?

**Jon Berger (00:54)**

The name of the book is What Happens When You Are Not In the Room? And it's a book about leadership. It's what is leadership, how do you do it, how do you get better at it, management, strategy, culture, motivation, all of the things that comprise leadership and inspiration and going faster together.

**Anne (01:21)**

That, to be honest, is very, very aligned with this podcast, especially the green aspects of this podcast, because we need to lead people or we need to be showing people the way so that they can lead themselves to be greener. We can't lead them because all we can do is show people tools and services and things that they can use to be more sustainable and to be more future-proof.

**Jon Berger (01:45)**

Absolutely. And no one else is in the room when you are podcasting. Not even me, I'm upstairs.

**Anne (01:51)**

Indeed. Although one day we'll actually work out how to do episodes where we're both in the same room. That will be both incredibly interesting and useful, but totally against the theme of your book. But anyway, talking about that, What Happens When You're Not in the Room? That is an excellent name for a book. Why did you come up with it?

**Jon Berger (02:14)**

I did think about this a lot because for a while I wanted to write a leadership book, but there are so many out there and so many of them are really good. I read a lot of leadership books, I enjoy a lot of them, I've got a lot of value from them, and they tend to come at things from different ways, and that's useful. And a lot of the books I reference, I reference in my book as well, because I think they're useful.

But I wanted to do something that was a bit different that I thought would work better for me and for something that I think I would have found more useful earlier in my career, but also still now. I didn't want a set of instructions, I didn't want a recipe, I didn't want to just "do this one thing and everything will be great," because although those books are quite fun to read and interesting and tell you something, they're really just one thin aspect of what you're trying to do rather than everything that you're trying to do. 

And the reality is that leadership isn't one idea or one recipe or just do this. Even in any one circumstance, there are different things that you might want to do or experiment with, depending on your context, depending on who you are, who you're leading, what your situation is. So I wanted a book that would cover a lot of ground and help folks to lead in whatever circumstance they found themselves in, and therefore wasn't a recipe, wasn't an "if this, then do that."

And I think that then naturally led itself to a question being the title rather than an answer. It wasn't an "always do this," it was more an "always think about this." And the answers might push you in all sorts of different directions, but then it's you doing that thinking, and therefore you're going to be more confident and capable of acting on it because it's your plan that you're doing, not some book telling you to do it. And I wanted the focus of it to be on the point of it. The point of it all is for someone that you are leading, a person or people or millions of people who you are leading, to do something, to achieve something. And that's mostly going to happen when you're not there. So the premise of the book is success is not measured by what you do when you're in the room; success is what happens when you're not in the room, and leadership is how you influence the people who are in the room.

**Anne (04:49)**

I have to say my favourite bit of the book is the bit on the back cover where it says, "Question: What happens when you're not in the room? Answer: All the work gets done." I think there's nothing that really encapsulates the book more than that. 

We talk a lot about leadership, and one of the issues with leadership, which you address in the book very well, actually, is the fact that it seems a little big-headed to describe yourself as a leader. So people don't. They think, "Well, I'm not a leader because I'm not Donald Trump. And I wouldn't want to be. And those are the only leaders. You're either Donald Trump or you're not." So they don't get ahead of themselves or go too big for their boots by defining themselves as a leader or even reading a leadership book, which is a little getting ahead of yourself.

But one of the things I like in your book is that any person who is going to be vaguely successful is going to have to be a leader, even if they're only leading themselves. So how to lead yourself is just an extension or a version of leading a million people, isn't it?

**Jon Berger (06:09)**

Absolutely. There is a section of the book on leading yourself, partly because that's where some people start, and partly because actually one of the problems that leaders have is keeping themselves motivated and pointing in the right direction, and practising on that and using the tools and techniques that work for you can be a powerful way of aligning everyone else and motivating them as well.

**Anne (06:45)**

So talking about leadership as being what happens when you're not in the room, is that about scale? Or is it about resilience? Is it about distributed systems?

**Jon Berger (06:59)**

Well, that's a great question, very on brand for your podcast. And the answer is: it depends. It depends on your context. And so for some people it will be one of those, for some people it will be all of those, for some people it will be none of those things, and it will change. 

If you're managing a large organization of hundreds of people, then sure, some of the time you're thinking about scale, but some of the time the way you are leading that organization is via your other leaders in the team. So some of the time you're thinking, "Okay, I need to go and talk to 500 people at a time because they need to hear my voice personally. They need to be able to connect and understand what direction I want here." But probably before you do that, you may have sat down with just two or three of your most trusted and valuable people to refine that message. And so at that point you're not thinking about scale; you are thinking about leading them, getting them on board. And maybe before that you're thinking about leading yourself and what do I have to do before I can have conversations of that form.

So there's one thing that happens where the end output is that everyone's aligned and everyone understands what direction you want to go in. But that process has gone through a whole series of different things. And maybe that's involved some conversations with different folks in different time zones, and you're not the one standing up in front of everyone—they are because they know people better or you want them to be the face of whatever it is that's happening. And that is both a distribution thing, there's resilience there, I suppose, and there are different ways of approaching scale. And you need to use all of them, probably.

**Anne (09:09)**

One thing that's interesting about the book is it's genuinely funny. It has jokes in it. I laughed when I was reading it, which, as Holly Cummins and I talked about on the podcast, you have to write and have jokes in it, both for the reader, because it's a useful tool to draw their attention to particular points that you want to make, but it's also utterly required if you're the author, because it's a hell of a slog writing a book. And you kind of need to leaven it a little bit for yourself by putting some jokes in

**Jon Berger (09:43)**

Well, I totally agree with you about the humour. I think work should be fun. That's probably not true of everyone in every industry, right? And I get there are some types of job that are really just, "I need to do this because I need to feed myself and my family, and if I don't have the cash at the end of the day, we're all going to starve." And sometimes that might not be fun, it might just be necessary. 

But certainly for my career, I've always worked in an environment where if I didn't like it, there are other jobs out there that I could go and find. And the same is true of everyone on my team, and I know that. So if it's not fun, what are people doing there?

So I've always wanted it to be fun. I've always enjoyed that side of things. I think that adds to what you're doing. It certainly helps team building, and the more people enjoy it, the more they're happy to be around and to enjoy working with other folks. Building a strong team is a lot of what you want to do. So I'm glad you enjoyed that.

I do have a fair number of jokes in there. They're not like knock-knock jokes, so if you don't get it, you probably just won't even notice that there was a joke there, which is fine, so it won't take anything away. And probably no one will spot all of them. It may even be that the me now will have forgotten a joke I wrote two years ago and even I can't see them anymore. But I think everything should be fun if it can be, and so writing.

**Jon Berger (11:26)**

Partly because of that, I actually really enjoyed writing the book. I thought it was a good experience. It wasn't a slog. I enjoyed getting my thoughts out there and being forced to think through it. I think one of the other guests on your podcast, Charles Humble, had a great quote which he mentioned, which was, "If you're not writing, you only think you're thinking." And certainly there were, while these were all things that I've spent a long time, like decades, thinking about in my career, still, when I came to put it down on paper, it was like, "Hmm, this thought isn't quite as clear now that I come to express it as it felt like it was in my head. I'm really going to have to work through that to be able to get it out."

**Anne (12:13)**

Yeah.

**Jon Berger (12:22)**

And that was good. I always thought that in my career, one of the superpowers I had turned out to be that I was basically rubbish at everything. You know, I started out in every job I had and it was like, "My god, this is just embarrassingly bad." And I don't know how close I came to being sacked many times, especially early on, but every time I moved to a new role, I was just awful at it.

**Anne (12:54)**

I remember. Because I was your wife at the time through all these things, you're thinking, "Gosh, I hope Jon doesn't get fired. But I'll be supportive, so I won't say that."

**Jon Berger (12:54)**

And then I got better and I learned. Yes, thank you for that. Well, I mean, I was lucky I had both you, but also a lot of the folks I worked with were very supportive. My managers gave me a lot of leeway and rope to make a lot of mistakes, and I learned from them and I got better as a result. And that's how my career took off, by doing that and constantly changing and learning and doing new things, and that was fun.

But as a result of having to learn those, not being natural at any of those things, I'm probably better able than a lot of people to be able to explain them to other folks as well. And that's what I've been doing in my career. That's the thing I enjoyed most, was being able to help other people, and the book is a natural extension of that.

**Anne (14:01)**

And you're very, very open in the book about your mistakes that you've made in the past. It's not like, "Here are all the amazing things that I've learned and I'm fantastic and you should learn from me." It's more like, "My god, here are all the terrible mistakes I made and what I learned from them and how I went on to become really very successful in my job through learning from mistakes, not pretending that I never made them."

So when you look back at the book, you make a lot of confessions about mistakes you made in the past. How do you feel about your past self?

**Jon Berger (14:51)**

How do I feel about my past self? I don't know how to answer that question.

I generally look back with sort of amusement. Like, no one died. There were some things I definitely could have done better, some things I learned from, I suppose. I mean, really, the more interesting topics are: what are all the things I didn't write about where I didn't learn a lesson? 

The ones which smacked me in the face and then I thought, "I really don't want to do that again." Those are the lessons I learned; I'm aware of those. The ones that just went "whoosh"—those are things I don't know about.

**Anne (15:36)**

Those are the ones that will come back to bite us in the future. 

Writing a book, obviously I've written loads and loads of books, does give you an awful lot of chance for self-reflection, but as you say, probably not as much chance for self-reflection as you think. When you write your science fiction book, you'll have a lot more chance for self-reflection because it's much wider.

**Jon Berger (16:09)**

Well, this was not trying to be a memoir, right? I am a very, very, very long way away from being famous enough for a memoir to be a sensible thing to do. And I'm not sure I would ever want to write one even if by some fluke I became famous. So it wasn't hard to keep things on track. The purpose of the stories was to illustrate a point I was trying to make, that there's something to learn from there. But people like stories, and people do find it easier to remember something if there's a bit of a tale around it rather than it's just a sort of straight fact or instruction or idea. And as I say, some of them were quite fun to write about. They're the things that I really think about and I think, "Well, I should write about this topic." Those are the things that instantly pop into my head as things that steered me and guided me and helped me to form my thinking in that space.

**Anne (17:19)**

And I like the fact that a lot of the early reviews of the book or the pre-release reviews of the book are people that you worked with. So either people who worked with you or worked for you or you worked for. I think that's quite nice, that's part of a nice story.

**Jon Berger (17:37)**

Yeah, it's nice I'm still talking to you then.

**Anne (17:41)**

Indeed. Well, you say it shows something, doesn't it? You are still friends with most of the people you worked with over the years, despite the fact that, I mean, I still remember in the early days, you could be quite cocky, which is one of the things that you mentioned in the book

**Jon Berger (18:04)**

That's true.

**Anne (18:08)**

So, what is it that you want to come out of the book? Because it's a heck of a lot of effort to write a book. I know that, having written—I'll have my tenth, my eleventh will be coming out quite soon—but it's unbelievably difficult to write a book. Why did you do it? What did you want to achieve?

**Jon Berger (18:33)**

Well, you're a writing machine, though, like you're, you know, I mean at least I can hold my head up in the house now that I'm not Johnny No-Book. But the idea of writing eleven is still not something I really have in mind. It is a lot of work. It does take time, right? There's a lot of thought that goes into it and a lot of iterations as well, and a lot of good feedback from people.

But it didn't feel like work when I was doing it. I wasn't getting paid to do this, I didn't need to finish it. I started because I wanted to learn as much as anything whether I could finish it, and thought that would be an interesting way of learning a bit more about myself. And I quite surprised myself by finding that actually almost the entire process was enjoyable. There was very little of it that I had to force my way through. The creation of almost all of it was like, "I'm quite enjoying doing this. I'm enjoying the thinking. I'm enjoying what I've created and rereading it and going over it."

So it wasn't a slog at any point. But it was an effort. It was something that I wanted to see what I could create, as part of it. And I wanted to see what impact that could have on other people, whether I could create something there that other people thought, "Yeah, this is a thing." And certainly so far, the early review feedback we've had has been very positive and makes me think, "Yeah, I'm glad I did it."

**Anne (20:37)**

I'm obviously going to ask you the question that people always ask me about my sci-fi books, which is: is there going to be a Netflix sci-fi action series?

**Jon Berger (20:48)**

I mean, they make all sorts of rubbish, so I can't see why not. Someone's going to have to do quite a lot of work on the dialogue. I've not really helped that much in creating the dialogue there, but it's a great title for a Netflix series. It could go in all sorts of different directions, couldn't it? Bit of leadership, bit of horror, bit of a thriller.

**Anne (20:55)**

Your Melania. 

**Jon Berger (21:19)**

Where's Wally? There's all sorts that could go underneath that title.

**Anne (21:25)**

That's true. And who would play you? At the risk of—obviously, there are the typecasting people that you could have to play you in the film or the Netflix series of your life.

**Jon Berger (21:38)**

You're not looking for someone with feature hair, are you? Who would play me?

**Anne (21:46)**

Well, obviously no hair is—I know you like to tell yourself you don't have feature hair, but no hair is feature hair. Because all the people we're thinking of have no hair. That means it is feature hair. Well, as in my novels, one of the things I commented on is people who were never posthumously copyrighted. So you could potentially be Yul Brynner. An AI-generated Yul Brynner could play you.

**Jon Berger (22:20)**

Yul Brynner, yeah. That'd be pretty cool.

**Anne (22:23)**

That would be good, yeah.

**Jon Berger (22:26)**

There are many shows in which Yul Brynner is a baddie—maybe Yul Brynner in *The Magnificent Seven*. Yul Brynner as a goodie.

**Anne (22:34)**

Actually, *The Magnificent Seven* is a classic leadership movie, isn't it, really? It's a classic type. In that book, he was both the leader and he was the assembler. It's one of the things you talk about quite a lot, that in some books the person who assembles is also the leader, or in some films or things, but not always. Like Gandalf assembled, but Aragorn led. So the assembler is not always the leader, but in *The Magnificent Seven*, I would say—

**Jon Berger (23:06)**

They're both leaders in that. And so Frodo's a leader, Sam is a leader, they all play their part. And there is a leadership part to all of those things. There's not one leader, and we think that's one of the key things that people confuse about leadership: "Who's the leader?" And they're all looking up in the organization is like, "No, no, no. Please let everyone be a leader."

**Anne (23:31)**

Actually, you're right. To be successful, you kind of—that's actually one of the points that you make over and over in the book, is that to be successful, you need to leadermax. You need as many leaders in your organization as possible. It's a bit more like *Buffy*, where at the end of *Buffy*, you've got all the potentials becoming slayers—that's the way that you succeed against the demons. You can't have one leader. You've got to have a lot of leaders. Ideally, everybody's a leader.

**Jon Berger (24:03)**

I think so.

**Anne (24:03)**

So when does the book come out?

**Jon Berger (24:09)**

The book comes out on the first of September and will be available in paperback from Amazon.

**Anne (24:17)**

The cover is already available on your website, which is JonBergerLeadership.com, which we'll have a link to in the show notes. You can sign up to be notified of events coming around the book and also download a sample. So you've got a sample on there. Tell us actually, before we go, a little bit about your sample, because I enjoyed that—it was my favorite chapter.

**Jon Berger (24:45)**

I can't decide what my favorite chapter is because every time I read it, I sort of pick up different things in it. But it's a slightly fun and whimsical chapter that I've pulled out, which is not necessarily representative of the rest of the book, but it's representative of the style of writing, I suppose. The title of the chapter is "What is the Difference Between Management and Leadership?" which is a question that people keep asking. I'm not even sure how valuable the question is or whether it really makes sense, but I discuss that a bit in lots of different ways.

The main conclusion I came to from writing the chapter is that it's actually just quite fun to think about the differences. And while I'm still not sure the question is actually that useful as such, because I don't think there is a good definitive answer, I came up with lots of different answers in that chapter, and almost all of them helped me to think through the problem. That's the result of many years of thinking. Those are different views I have had over the past thirty years of what the answer to that question should be and how that's evolved. So I hope people will enjoy reading that and also think a bit as a result.

**Anne (26:21)**

It's a chapter I enjoy as well. For readers who don't know—well, actually, no, I've already said that you're my husband, so that's the context, and I was the lead editor on this book. I like a joke, and I also like to talk a lot about cultural representations of the things that I'm reading about. We talk a lot about leadership as demonstrated in films and TV and books, and what's good about it, what's bad about it, what's management, what's leadership, and all those things. I guess for continual professional development, we watch a lot of TV. And I think we should definitely have an episode about management and leadership in TV. I'll probably bring in quite a few other contributors to your book to talk about that because there's loads of stuff to mine out of TV.

You do a little bit of that in the book, which is one of the reasons why it's really enjoyable—it's a beach read. There are not many leadership and strategy books you're going to come across that are a genuine beach read, but this is one of them. We tried to make *Building Green Software* a beach read, but it's an O'Reilly book, which means it's enormous, so you're not really going to carry that onto the beach because it's too big. Whereas your book will hopefully be a bit more compact, so it should be a little bit easier to carry around.

But thank you very much indeed for being on. I'll have you back, because you are an irregular co-host and I want to do an episode where we talk about leadership and management and strategy in sci-fi, in non-sci-fi, in TV, film, and books, because that really does reflect the kind of thing I'm interested in. But thank you very much for recording the episode today, which was to announce the availability of your book, *What Happens When You're Not in the Room*, 1st of September, available on Amazon. The cover reveal happened this week and I will splice in the cover at multiple points through this recording so that people can see it. Thank you very much to you, Jon, for being here.

**Jon Berger (28:47)**

Thank you. And if you are interested in the book, head over to JonBergerLeadership.com to sign up there to receive an update when the book is available to buy on Amazon. And as Anne said, for signing up you'll get early access to one of those chapters to whet your appetite.

**Anne (29:11)**

Excellent. Thank you very much for being on and thank you very much for all this. Now, for this episode, I'm keen to get feedback on—you can give me feedback on the chapter if you download and read that, but I'm also very keen to get suggestions for examples of management or leadership on TV, films, or books that you'd like us to talk about. Because we love to watch TV. If you give us a job of watching some TV or a film, we will absolutely adore doing that. And then we'll pick it apart and say, "Well, what do you think they could have learned from reading your book, Jon? And what do you think you should have included that they did that was good that should have been in your book?" So we'll talk about that.

Comments—you can either send things to me on LinkedIn, I'm very happy to connect to people and take comments, or if you're watching on YouTube, just pop some comments below. That's the easiest way to say, "talk about this TV show, talk about this." What is your favorite TV show about leadership? Who's your favorite leader? Is it Gandalf? Is it Nick Fury? Is it Yul Brynner in *The Magnificent Seven*? There are other forms of leadership. It doesn't just have to be those obvious types; there can be more subtle—like TV show detectives, are they leaders? Are they not leaders? Was Sherlock Holmes a leader, or was Dr. Watson a leader, or were neither of them leaders? That's the kind of thing that we want to be talking about in the podcast in the future. Thank you.

**Jon Berger (30:51)**

Lieutenant Chard in *Zulu*, and SpongeBob SquarePants.

**Anne (30:56)**

SpongeBob SquarePants. I really want to talk about the leadership demonstrated by SpongeBob SquarePants and what we can learn from that. So thank you very much indeed for listening, and I will catch you on a future episode of the Asynchronous and Unreliable podcast. Thank you very much.