THE UNFAIR ADVANTAGE

The story of a businessman whose horizons are broadened by an eccentric bipolar billionaire.

As Hagopian tells in his story, he enjoyed meteoric success early on: “financial advisor right out of school, youngest bank manager in Michigan, almost-full scholarship to business school, frequent promotions in the Fortune 500.” But the entire time he was experiencing that success, he was also living a tormented alternate life full of arrests, failed relationships, and “a daily battle with suicidal thoughts.” This cruel contrast was eventually explained by a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Hagopian here looks back on his life as a successful business executive when he was married and adding children to his life, drinking heavily at all times, barely sleeping, and being incredibly productive (“wild, dramatic, hypomanic episodes followed by severe dips into bipolar depression”). With treatment and medication, he was able to get his symptoms under control, but at a cost: Suddenly, the “hypomanic edge” his disorder had given him in the business world was gone. In these pages, he seeks to outline something he calls the Hypomanic Operational Turnaround System—a means of harnessing some of the advantages of the hypomanic state while avoiding its negative aspects (“Setting grandiose goals,” “Getting more out of teams by creating battles,” and “Encouraging orthodoxy-smashing innovation” are all tools in this box.) The author elects to explicate all of this through fiction, in the form of a story about a struggling businessman named Jack Whelan who meets a charismatic bipolar businessman who introduces him to the HOT system. This is a misstep—Hagopian is far more engaging when writing about his own life than he is when crafting Jack Whelan’s story, which often makes for leaden reading. The characters are prone to pronouncements like, “We’ve got some decisions to make. We need to choose which lines get the new tools and we need to choose wisely.” Readers with patience for this Richest Man in Babylon sort of approach will find some compelling thoughts here about pushing boundaries in healthy ways.

A thought-provoking, if occasionally labored, business-world story about leveraging manic behavior.