Introducing the book, Resolute: A guide to clarity, leadership, and growth in a disruptive world

After twenty-five years working with hundreds of organizations across industries and continents, I've witnessed a troubling pattern: brilliant leaders with capable teams repeatedly fail to execute their most important strategies. Not because they lack talent, resources, or market opportunities—but because they lack something far more fundamental: Organizational Memory.

This pattern—which I call Business Amnesia—has grown dramatically worse in recent years as disruption accelerates, teams become more distributed, and the pace of change overwhelms traditional management approaches. Organizations forget their own decisions, lose track of strategic priorities, and repeatedly cycle through the same mistakes because there's no systematic way to capture, preserve, and activate institutional knowledge.

Resolute: A guide to clarity, leadership, and growth in a disruptive world addresses this crisis head-on. The book emerged from two decades of real-world experience helping organizations build the clarity, alignment, and execution systems needed to thrive amid relentless disruption—without succumbing to the organizational amnesia that derails most strategic initiatives.

Why Resolute? Why Now?

The business landscape has fundamentally changed in ways that make traditional leadership approaches inadequate. Three forces have converged to create an execution crisis:

The Acceleration of Disruption

Change isn't new. What's new is the velocity of change and the way disruptions compound. Markets that remained stable for decades now transform completely in 18 months. Technologies that seemed science fiction become mainstream before organizations can adapt. Competitive advantages that took years to build evaporate overnight.

Research from McKinsey shows that 70% of large-scale transformation efforts fail, with the primary causes being poor coordination, inadequate leadership alignment, and loss of institutional knowledge during change. Business Amnesia doesn't just slow adaptation—it makes sustained organizational change virtually impossible.

The Distributed Work Revolution

The shift to remote and hybrid work has shattered traditional mechanisms for maintaining organizational memory. The hallway conversations, informal mentoring, and ambient awareness that once preserved institutional knowledge have largely disappeared. What remains are fragmented communication tools, overwhelming meeting calendars, and information silos that prevent knowledge from flowing across organizational boundaries.

Harvard Business Review research on distributed teams reveals that organizations struggle most with maintaining strategic context and ensuring alignment—precisely the functions that organizational memory serves. When teams can't easily access decisions, rationale, and lessons learned, every discussion starts from scratch and coordination breaks down.

The Complexity Crisis

Modern organizations face unprecedented complexity. Cross-functional dependencies multiply. Regulatory requirements expand. Customer expectations evolve constantly. Supply chains span continents. Technology stacks integrate dozens of platforms. This complexity overwhelms human working memory and traditional management approaches.

Without systematic organizational memory, leaders can't maintain coherent understanding of their own organizations. Strategic priorities conflict with operational realities. Initiatives launch without awareness of previous failures. Resources get allocated to activities that don't serve goals. The result is strategic drift despite intense activity.

The Core Thesis: From Amnesia to Resolution

Resolute argues that organizational effectiveness in disruptive environments requires three interconnected capabilities:

Strategic Clarity: Absolute precision about what you're trying to achieve, why it matters, and how success will be measured. Not vague aspirations or corporate platitudes, but crystal-clear strategic priorities that everyone understands and can reference when making decisions.

Aligned Leadership: Leadership teams that share genuine alignment on strategy, communicate consistently across the organization, and model the behaviors and priorities they expect others to embrace. Not superficial agreement in the boardroom followed by contradictory messages in the field, but deep strategic alignment that persists under pressure.

Systematic Execution: Proven frameworks and practices that translate strategy into action, maintain momentum through obstacles, and build organizational memory that compounds rather than evaporates. Not chaotic activity or flavor-of-the-month programs, but disciplined execution systems that work.

These capabilities don't emerge from inspiration or intensity. They emerge from systematic practices that build robust organizational memory—making strategic context accessible, documenting decisions with rationale, tracking commitments to completion, and ensuring that hard-won lessons aren't forgotten when key people depart or attention shifts.

The Business Amnesia Framework

The book's organizing framework examines how Business Amnesia manifests across five critical domains and provides practical approaches for building organizational memory in each:

Strategic Amnesia: Forgetting Why We Decided This

Most organizations invest enormous energy in strategic planning, producing comprehensive documents with detailed analyses and ambitious goals. Then, six months later, the same leadership team struggles to articulate their strategy or explain why specific priorities were chosen.

Strategic amnesia occurs when organizations fail to capture and preserve the context around strategic decisions—not just what was decided, but why, what alternatives were considered, what assumptions underpin the strategy, and what would cause you to reconsider.

Resolute provides frameworks for building strategic memory:

• Decision Documentation: Systematic capture of strategic decisions with full context, accessible to everyone who needs to make strategy-aligned choices
• Assumption Tracking: Explicit identification and monitoring of the assumptions underlying strategy, with triggers for when assumptions need revision
• Strategic Narrative: Compelling storytelling that makes strategy memorable and meaningful rather than forgettable and bureaucratic

Goal Amnesia: Losing Track of What Matters Most

Organizations set goals constantly—annual objectives, quarterly targets, project milestones, individual KPIs. Yet research shows that most employees can't name their organization's top three priorities, and even leadership teams frequently can't agree on which goals matter most.

Goal amnesia manifests when:

• Teams pursue activities disconnected from strategic objectives
• Resource allocation decisions don't reflect stated priorities
• Performance conversations focus on last week's crisis rather than long-term goals
• Successful goal achievement goes unrecognized while failures consume attention

The book provides goal management frameworks that create persistent organizational memory around priorities:

• Goal Hierarchies: Cascading structures that connect individual activities to team goals to departmental objectives to organizational strategy
• Progress Visibility: Dashboard approaches that make goal status immediately apparent across the organization
• Commitment Tracking: Systems that ensure promises made in planning meetings translate to completed actions rather than disappearing into email archives

Execution Amnesia: Forgetting How We Do This

Organizations repeatedly reinvent wheels because previous approaches, lessons, and solutions aren't systematically captured. A product team launches a feature using an approach that a different team tried and abandoned two years ago. A market entry strategy replicates mistakes from the last expansion because the people who learned those lessons have moved on.

Execution amnesia is perhaps the most expensive form of Business Amnesia because it causes organizations to pay learning costs repeatedly rather than building on accumulated knowledge.

Resolute introduces execution memory practices:

• Process Documentation: Capturing not just what processes exist but why they were designed this way and under what circumstances they should evolve
• Project Post-Mortems: Structured learning capture after major initiatives that extracts transferable lessons
• Decision Logs: Accessible records of significant execution decisions that prevent future teams from relitigating settled questions

People Amnesia: Losing Knowledge When People Leave

The average tenure of employees continues to decline across industries. When people depart, they take institutional knowledge with them—understanding of why systems were built certain ways, relationships with key partners, awareness of past failures, insights about customer needs.

Organizations without systematic knowledge transfer practices experience catastrophic memory loss during every transition, forcing new people to rediscover knowledge that was already known.

The book addresses people memory through:

• Knowledge Transfer Protocols: Systematic processes for extracting and documenting critical knowledge before departures
• Collaborative Documentation: Cultural practices that make knowledge capture part of regular work rather than a special project
• Mentoring Systems: Structured approaches to transferring tacit knowledge that can't be easily documented

Learning Amnesia: Forgetting Our Own Lessons

Organizations conduct extensive post-project reviews, customer research, market analyses, and competitive assessments. These exercises generate valuable insights—which promptly disappear into file systems where they're never referenced again.

Learning amnesia occurs when organizations fail to activate the knowledge they've already generated. The insights exist somewhere, but they're not accessible when making related decisions, so the same analyses get repeated and the same mistakes recur.

Resolute provides learning activation frameworks:

• Searchable Knowledge Systems: Technology approaches that make organizational learning discoverable when needed
• Learning Integration: Processes that incorporate lessons learned into planning and decision-making workflows
• Pattern Recognition: Practices for identifying recurring situations where previous learning should apply

The Resolute Leadership Model

Beyond frameworks for building organizational memory, the book introduces a comprehensive leadership model adapted for disruptive environments. This model recognizes that traditional command-and-control leadership is obsolete, but complete delegation without structure creates chaos.

Leading with Clarity

Effective leaders in disruptive environments provide absolute clarity about what matters while empowering teams to determine how to achieve it. This requires:

Strategic Precision: The ability to distill complex strategies into memorable, actionable priorities that guide daily decisions. Not simplistic slogans, but genuinely clear strategic direction that everyone can understand and apply.

Honest Communication: Willingness to acknowledge uncertainty, share difficult realities, and resist the temptation to present false confidence. Research from Google's Project Aristotle shows that psychological safety—which depends on honest communication—is the strongest predictor of team effectiveness.

Consistent Messaging: Disciplined repetition of strategic priorities across all communication channels and leadership interactions. One CEO I worked with calculated that he needed to communicate the same strategic message at least 12 times before it reliably influenced decision-making across his organization.

Building Aligned Leadership Teams

The book dedicates extensive attention to leadership team dynamics because organizational performance is ultimately constrained by how well the leadership team functions. Brilliant individual leaders can't compensate for dysfunctional leadership team dynamics.

Resolute provides frameworks for:

Productive Conflict: Structured approaches for ensuring leadership teams debate ideas vigorously while maintaining relationship integrity. The absence of productive conflict produces false consensus that collapses under pressure.

Decision Clarity: Explicit protocols for who decides what and how collective decisions will be made. Ambiguity about decision rights is among the most common causes of leadership team dysfunction.

Accountability Protocols: Systems for ensuring leadership team members follow through on commitments and address performance issues directly rather than avoiding difficult conversations.

Driving Systematic Execution

The leadership model emphasizes that execution isn't about working harder or demanding more urgency. It's about building systematic practices that maintain momentum, surface obstacles early, and ensure strategic priorities actually drive resource allocation.

Key execution disciplines include:

Cascading Goals: Translating strategic priorities into clear objectives at every organizational level, ensuring everyone knows how their work connects to broader strategy

Progress Rituals: Establishing regular rhythms for reviewing progress, identifying obstacles, and making course corrections before small issues become crises

Resource Alignment: Ensuring budgets, headcount allocations, and leadership attention actually reflect stated strategic priorities rather than legacy patterns or political pressures

Practical Tools and Frameworks

Resolute isn't a theoretical text—it's a practical guidebook filled with immediately applicable frameworks, templates, and examples drawn from real organizations.

Strategic Planning Framework

The book provides a comprehensive approach to strategic planning that builds organizational memory from the beginning:

• Environmental Scanning Template: Structured methods for analyzing market forces, competitive dynamics, and internal capabilities
• Strategic Choice Framework: Decision-making process for evaluating alternative strategies with explicit criteria
• Strategy Documentation Guide: Templates for capturing strategic decisions with full context and making them accessible across the organization
• Implementation Planning Tools: Approaches for translating strategy into specific initiatives with clear ownership and metrics

Goal Management System

Drawing on proven methodologies like OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) while addressing their common implementation failures, Resolute presents:

• Goal Hierarchy Design: How to structure goals from strategic objectives through tactical initiatives
• Metric Selection Criteria: Frameworks for choosing measures that actually drive desired behaviors rather than gaming
• Progress Review Protocols: Meeting structures that focus on learning and adaptation rather than blame
• Goal Revision Guidelines: When and how to adjust goals based on changing circumstances versus when persistence is required

Execution Frameworks

The book's execution frameworks address the systematic practices that separate organizations that achieve ambitious goals from those that perpetually struggle:

• Weekly Commitment Protocol: Simple system for maintaining execution momentum between larger planning cycles
• Obstacle Escalation Process: How to surface and resolve blockers before they derail initiatives
• Cross-Functional Coordination: Approaches for managing dependencies across teams and departments
• Resource Allocation Method: Frameworks for ensuring resources actually flow to strategic priorities

Knowledge Management Approaches

Recognizing that organizational memory requires both cultural practices and technological enablement, the book provides:

• Decision Documentation Template: What information to capture about important decisions and where to store it
• Knowledge Transfer Protocol: Systematic approach to extracting institutional knowledge before people depart
• Learning Review Process: How to conduct post-project reviews that generate transferable insights
• Searchable Knowledge System Design: Technology selection criteria and implementation approaches

Real-World Case Studies

Throughout Resolute, real-world examples illustrate how organizations have built the clarity, alignment, and execution systems needed to thrive amid disruption:

Technology Scale-Up: From Chaos to Coherence

A fast-growing SaaS company had achieved product-market fit and was scaling rapidly but experiencing dangerous drift. Different departments pursued conflicting priorities. The executive team couldn't agree on strategy. Talented people were burning out from chaotic execution.

The case study examines how this organization:

• Conducted rigorous strategic clarification that forced difficult trade-offs and established clear priorities
• Built goal cascades that aligned departmental objectives with overall strategy
• Implemented systematic execution practices that reduced firefighting and increased predictability
• Created organizational memory systems that preserved institutional knowledge despite rapid hiring

Within 18 months, employee satisfaction increased, customer acquisition efficiency improved by 40%, and the leadership team achieved genuine alignment on strategic direction.

Professional Services Transformation: Adapting to Disruption

A mid-sized consulting firm faced existential pressure from changing client expectations and new competitive models. Traditional approaches that had worked for decades were suddenly obsolete, but the partnership struggled to agree on how to adapt.

This case explores how the firm:

• Used structured strategic dialogue to surface and resolve fundamental disagreements about future direction
• Established strategic alignment on a bold transformation strategy
• Built change management practices that maintained institutional knowledge while evolving the business model
• Created learning systems that captured insights from early transformation initiatives and applied them to later efforts

The transformation ultimately succeeded, positioning the firm for continued growth in a fundamentally changed market, because the leadership team maintained strategic clarity and built organizational memory that persisted through significant change.

Manufacturing Turnaround: From Decline to Growth

A traditional manufacturing business faced declining margins, increasing competition, and disengaged workforce. Previous improvement initiatives had launched with fanfare and quietly died without delivering results, creating cynicism about change.

The case study details how this organization:

• Rebuilt trust by acknowledging previous failures and committing to different approaches
• Established execution discipline through systematic goal management and progress tracking
• Created continuous improvement culture where frontline knowledge was systematically captured and activated
• Built organizational memory that compounded learning rather than forcing people to repeatedly solve the same problems

Over three years, the business returned to profitability, improved quality metrics significantly, and created sustainable competitive advantages based on operational excellence and organizational learning.

Who Should Read Resolute?

The book serves multiple audiences who share a common challenge: leading organizations effectively amid relentless disruption.

CEOs and Business Owners

For CEOs and owners, Resolute provides comprehensive frameworks for building organizations that can execute strategy consistently, maintain alignment despite growth, and preserve institutional knowledge through transitions. The book addresses the specific challenges of leading from the top—balancing delegation with accountability, maintaining strategic focus amid constant demands, and building leadership teams that multiply rather than constrain organizational capability.

Executive Teams

Leadership team members will find practical tools for improving team dynamics, making better collective decisions, and ensuring true alignment versus superficial agreement. The book doesn't shy away from difficult realities about leadership team dysfunction and provides concrete approaches for addressing common challenges.

Functional Leaders

Department heads and functional leaders face the challenge of translating enterprise strategy into functional execution while managing up, across, and down. Resolute provides frameworks for connecting functional goals to enterprise strategy, coordinating across organizational boundaries, and building team execution capability.

Organizational Development Professionals

HR leaders, organization development consultants, and change management professionals will find comprehensive frameworks for building organizational capabilities that persist. The book's emphasis on systematic practices and organizational memory directly addresses the common pattern where organizational development initiatives generate initial enthusiasm but fail to create lasting change.

Board Members and Advisors

Those governing or advising organizations need frameworks for assessing whether management teams have the clarity, alignment, and execution systems required for success. Resolute provides both diagnostic frameworks for identifying gaps and guidance for productive board-management dialogue about organizational effectiveness.

How the Book Connects to Waymaker

Resolute emerged from the same real-world experience and intellectual foundations that led to Waymaker platform development. While the book provides comprehensive frameworks and practices applicable with any tools, readers frequently ask about the connection to Waymaker.

The relationship is straightforward: Resolute articulates the what and why of organizational clarity, alignment, and execution. Waymaker provides the how—the technological platform that makes the book's frameworks practical at scale.

Specifically:

Strategic Clarity: The book describes how to develop clear strategy and maintain strategic memory. Waymaker provides the platform where strategic decisions, rationale, and assumptions are documented and made accessible across the organization.

Goal Alignment: Resolute presents frameworks for cascading goals and maintaining goal visibility. Waymaker implements those frameworks as intuitive software that makes goal hierarchies, progress tracking, and commitment management systematic rather than heroic.

Execution Discipline: The book details execution practices like weekly commitments, obstacle escalation, and progress reviews. Waymaker embeds those practices into workflows, making them natural rather than burdensome.

Organizational Memory: Throughout Resolute, the necessity of building institutional knowledge is emphasized. Waymaker provides the technological foundation for capturing, organizing, and activating that knowledge.

Many readers engage with the book first to understand the frameworks conceptually, then adopt Waymaker to implement them systematically. Others discover Waymaker through practical need, then read Resolute to deepen their understanding of the underlying principles.

Critical Themes Throughout Resolute

Several core themes recur throughout the book, representing fundamental principles that transcend specific frameworks or techniques:

Systems Over Heroes

Organizations can't scale on heroic individual effort. Sustainable success requires systematic practices that work regardless of who executes them. Resolute emphasizes building systems and organizational memory that preserve knowledge, maintain alignment, and drive execution even when key people depart.

This doesn't diminish leadership importance—it elevates it. Leaders who build systems create lasting impact. Leaders who rely on personal heroics create fragile organizations that collapse when they leave.

Memory Over Intensity

Organizations often respond to execution challenges by demanding more urgency, longer hours, and greater intensity. This approach produces burnout, not breakthrough. The real solution is building organizational memory that prevents repeated mistakes, preserves hard-won lessons, and allows each initiative to build on previous learning rather than starting from scratch.

Clarity Over Complexity

In complex environments, leaders often mirror that complexity in their communication and planning. Resolute argues for the opposite: complexity demands clarity. When environments are chaotic, leaders must provide crystal-clear priorities, unambiguous goals, and simple decision frameworks that help people navigate uncertainty.

Alignment Over Agreement

The book distinguishes genuine alignment—where teams share understanding of strategy, even if they disagree with some elements—from superficial agreement that collapses under pressure. Building alignment requires honest dialogue, productive conflict, and systematic practices for ensuring everyone understands strategy, whether or not they initially agreed with it.

Adaptation Over Adherence

While Resolute emphasizes systematic practices and organizational memory, it equally emphasizes the necessity of adaptation. The goal isn't creating rigid processes that resist change—it's building organizational memory and learning systems that enable informed adaptation based on evidence rather than reactive thrashing based on the latest crisis.

Getting Started with Resolute Frameworks

For readers eager to begin applying Resolute frameworks immediately, the book provides clear starting points based on your organization's most pressing challenges:

If Strategic Clarity Is Your Primary Challenge

Organizations lacking strategic clarity typically exhibit symptoms like:

• Executive team disagreement about priorities
• Conflicting initiatives consuming resources
• Employee confusion about direction
• Difficulty saying "no" to opportunities that don't serve strategy

Start with:

1. Strategic Clarification Workshop: Structured process for achieving leadership team alignment on strategic priorities
2. Strategy Documentation Protocol: Template for capturing strategic decisions with context and rationale
3. Strategic Communication Plan: Framework for ensuring strategy is communicated consistently across the organization

If Goal Alignment Is Your Primary Challenge

Organizations with poor goal alignment show:

• Disconnect between stated priorities and actual resource allocation
• Functional goals that conflict with each other
• Inability to measure progress toward strategic objectives
• Tendency to react to urgent issues rather than pursue important goals

Start with:

1. Goal Hierarchy Design: Create cascading objectives from strategy through team level
2. Progress Dashboard Implementation: Make goal status visible across the organization
3. Quarterly Planning Cadence: Establish rhythm for reviewing and adjusting goals

If Execution Consistency Is Your Primary Challenge

Organizations struggling with execution typically experience:

• Strong planning but weak implementation
• Initiatives that launch with fanfare and quietly die
• Frequent firefighting and crisis management
• Low completion rates on commitments

Start with:

1. Weekly Commitment Protocol: Simple system for tracking and completing commitments
2. Obstacle Escalation Process: Clear pathways for surfacing and resolving blockers
3. Progress Review Meetings: Regular cadence for examining goal progress and adapting approach

If Organizational Memory Is Your Primary Challenge

Organizations with weak organizational memory demonstrate:

• Repeated mistakes and reinvented wheels
• Heavy dependence on specific individuals' knowledge
• Difficulty onboarding new people
• Loss of institutional knowledge during transitions

Start with:

1. Decision Documentation Template: Systematic capture of important decisions with context
2. Knowledge Transfer Protocol: Process for extracting knowledge before key departures
3. Learning Review Practice: Post-project reviews that generate transferable insights

Conclusion: From Disruption to Resolution

We live in an era of relentless disruption. Markets transform. Technologies evolve. Competitive advantages erode. Customer expectations shift. This reality isn't changing—if anything, the pace of disruption continues accelerating.

But disruption doesn't determine your organization's fate. How you lead through disruption determines your fate.

Organizations that will thrive in coming years won't be those with the most brilliant strategies or the most talented individuals. They'll be organizations that build the clarity, alignment, and execution systems needed to adapt rapidly while maintaining strategic coherence. They'll be organizations that build robust organizational memory, allowing them to compound learning rather than repeatedly pay the same learning costs.

Resolute: A guide to clarity, leadership, and growth in a disruptive world provides the frameworks, tools, and inspiration needed to build such organizations. Not through wishful thinking or motivational platitudes, but through systematic practices grounded in two decades of real-world experience helping hundreds of organizations achieve ambitious goals despite challenging circumstances.

The question isn't whether you'll face disruption. The question is whether you'll build the organizational capabilities needed to thrive through it.

Resolute helps you answer that question with confidence and build an organization that doesn't just survive disruption—but grows stronger because of it.

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Stuart Leo is the founder of Waymaker and author of "Resolute," helping organizations build the systems and capabilities needed to achieve ambitious goals without falling victim to Business Amnesia. The book is available through major retailers and directly through the Waymaker platform.