Learn and be Curious: Why this moment demands it
Of all Amazon's Leadership Principles, "Learn and be Curious" is the one that resonates most with me personally. The principle states:
"Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to explore them."
This has always mattered, but in the age of AI, it's become essential. The pace of change in what's possible has accelerated beyond anything we've seen. Capabilities that didn't exist six months ago are now standard. Tools that seemed experimental are reshaping how entire teams work. Business models that looked stable are being reimagined. Leaders who wait to learn until things "settle down" will find themselves permanently behind.
The AI era rewards three specific behaviors that embody "Learn and be Curious":
Accelerated learning: You can't wait for formal training programs or comprehensive understanding before engaging with AI. The learning cycle needs to compress from months to weeks to days. This means learning by doing - using AI tools for real work, not just attending webinars about them. It means reading outputs critically and asking "why did it do that?" instead of just accepting results. It means studying what your peers discover and sharing what you learn. The organizations I work with that are succeeding with AI have leaders who are actively using Claude, ChatGPT, and other tools themselves - not just delegating exploration to others.
Active experimentation: Curiosity without action is just academic interest. The principle explicitly says leaders "act to explore" new possibilities. This means running small experiments constantly. Try using AI for a task you've always done manually. Test whether a tool your peer mentioned actually helps with your workflow. Build a quick prototype to see if an idea has merit. The cost of experimentation has dropped dramatically - most experiments take hours or days, not months. The bigger risk is not experimenting at all while your market learns faster than you do.
Exploring new tools and ways of working: It's not about chasing every shiny new tool. It's about genuine curiosity regarding how work could be different. When you hear about Claude Skills, NotebookLM, or any new capability, the curious response is: "Could this change how my team works?". When you see someone using AI differently than you do, the curious response is: "What are they seeing that I'm missing?". When a process that's "always been done this way" suddenly becomes automatable, the curious response is: "What becomes possible if we're not spending time on this anymore?"
This week, commit to learning one new AI capability through direct use. Not reading about it - actually using it. Pick something you've heard about but haven't tried: a new tool, a different prompting technique, a workflow someone else shared. Spend one hour experimenting with it on real work. See what you learn by doing, not by studying.
Because in this moment, the leaders who learn fastest - and act on what they learn - are building advantages that compound daily.