How Great Companies Become Ultimate Learning Machines
A way to reverse-engineer healthy learning cultures inside companies.
On August 12, 2019, I received a text message that turned my stomach.
“Andrew, I’m leaving.”
I founded my business, Curious Lion, to help companies develop and retain their best talent, but I couldn’t even keep my own people on board.
At the time, we were a remote team of four, and one of the remaining two had a foot out the door. Without us all working on our projects, we’d lose clients. I was in my own version of a Great Resignation crisis, which propelled me to flip everything I thought I knew about corporate learning on its head.
Our model for helping great companies learn was causing our own company to fail. Yet I still tolerated the old model. That was about to change.
In the most personal essay I’ve ever written about my business, I share how turnover at my own company led me to rethink corporate learning and help top companies like Pinterest, Bolt, and Brex completely transform how they develop their talent.
This essay builds on what I’ve been sharing with you about the Circle of Learning.
It chronicles how I discovered a way to systematize how we really learn inside companies.
It shows how I found a way to reverse-engineer a healthy learning culture.
And it all starts with curiosity.
“Success is just a byproduct of learning, and learning is a byproduct of curiosity. Ultimately, if you are curious about something, you will be successful at it, and the more curious you are about it, the more successful you will be at it.”
–Naval Ravikant