Bold, unconventional and raw…
Hagopian’s business guide isn’t your typical business book. It begins not with vision, but with a confession. Hagopian, a high-achieving executive, lays bare the cost of his undiagnosed bipolar disorder, including arrests, burnout, near-suicide. Instead of collapsing under it, he mined chaos to build a system: a set of tools forged in the heat of hypomanic energy, refined for sustainable success.
The book blends memoir, business parable, and strategy guide. The story follows Jack Whelan, president of a failing shopping cart company. Enter Eugene Spark, a charismatic billionaire with bipolar disorder and a radical management philosophy based on the hypomanic mindset. Through Eugene, Jack and readers are introduced to the HOT system (Hypomanic Operational Turnaround), a high-intensity framework rooted in cognitive and behavioral patterns of hypomania.
Hagopian’s approach recalls The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt but goes deeper emotionally. Eugene isn’t just a guru. He is a volatile visionary. The HOT tools, such as the Karelin Method, grandiose goal-setting, and orthodoxy-smashing innovation, aren’t new, but here they’re recast in a raw, urgent context. Jack is deeply human: flawed, burned out, barely hanging on. His journey reveals both the cost of broken leadership and the resilience needed to repair it. Importantly, the book doesn’t glamorize bipolar disorder. Hagopian draws a clear line between the productivity of hypomania and the destruction of mania. The book isn’t for everyone. Its tone is bold, its personal disclosures raw. But that’s also its power. This isn’t just a business book: it’s a lifeline for high-performers on the edge, offering tools to build without burning out. And for anyone running on fumes, that might be the most valuable system of all.
Koehler Books
Pub date January 20, 2026
ISBN 979-8888249710
Pages 310 pages
