The FIRED Leader

**Business Book Awards 2024 Finalist**

To survive disruption, organizations need disruptive leaders.

So they hire them. And then they fire them.

It’s the open secret everyone in the leadership industry knows but nobody is addressing: leadership culture is toxic, and leadership systems have failed. Publicly, organizations say they want leaders to be innovative thinkers who challenge the status quo. Privately, conventional leadership culture wants nothing of the sort. Leaders deemed as ‘a bad culture fit’ quickly find themselves marginalized, ostracized, and even exorcised. The qualities that get them hired are the ones that get them fired. Yet, these rebels and nonconformists often embody the very leadership qualities that organizations so desperately need to navigate disruption and adapt to the “new normal” of constant change.

Radically refreshing and practical, this book identifies five leadership qualities (F.I.R.E.D. Leadership™) that are key to tomorrow’s leadership success and offers a step-by-step blueprint to show organizations how to integrate these five crucial qualities into their current leadership identification, recruitment, onboarding, and development processes.

'Exactly what we need to fix our broken leaders.’- Whitney Johnson

‘A necessary read for anyone wanting to lead bravely.’ John Spence

Leadership maverick Paul McCarthy shows organizations how to reframe how they view their troublemakers, agitators, rebels, oddballs and shit-stirrers – to see the hidden leadership qualities driving those behaviors, and why they need them so desperately.