Stuart Leo

Stuart Leo is the founder of Waymaker, an operator, and the author of Resolute. He has spent his career in the seat leaders actually sit in — running turnarounds, building teams, and shipping the software that businesses run on. Resolute is the framework that came out of that work.

Resolute exists because the framework leaders needed didn’t exist. Plenty of books teach tactics. Few teach the foundation the tactics are supposed to sit on. Stuart wrote the one he’d have wanted — foundation-first, written from inside the job, not above it.

It’s the same conviction behind everything he builds: that a leader and a business are only as steady as what they’re built on — and that the order you build in is the whole game.

HMS Resolute was a British ship abandoned in the Arctic ice in 1854, recovered by an American whaler, and returned to Queen Victoria as an act of goodwill. Her timbers were carved into the Resolute Desk — the desk in the Oval Office from which John F. Kennedy turned the chaos of the Bay of Pigs into clarity. The name has meant the same thing ever since: resilience, and steadfast leadership through disruption.

Two symbols from that era run through the whole method. The Resolute Desk, where Kennedy turned the wreckage of the Bay of Pigs into clarity — leading the future, boldly. And the Situation Room he built beneath the West Wing — seeing the present clearly, fast enough to act. Manage the present; lead the future. The name carries both.