Johnben Teik-Cheok Loy, MBA, MTS, Ph.D. Abstract This article captures the key learning lessons gleaned from the author’s experience learning and developing a grounded theory for his doctoral dissertation using the classic methodology as conceived by Barney Glaser. The theory was developed through data gathered on founders and successors of Malaysian Chinese family-own businesses. The main concern for Malaysian Chinese family businesses emerged as dynasting . the building, maintaining, and growing the power and resources of the business within the family lineage. The core category emerged as dynasting across cultures, where founders and successors struggle to transition from traditional Chinese to hybrid cultural and modernized forms of family business from one generation to the next. The key learning lessons were categorized under five headings: (a) sorting through different versions of grounded theory, (b) educating and managing research stakeholders, (c) embracing experiential learning, (d) discovering the core category: grounded intuition, and (e) recognizing limitations and possibilities. Keywords: grounded theory, learning, dynasting, family business, Chinese Introduction My journey towards grounded theory began in my doctoral studies after I had engaged in and published several quantitative survey research projects and found the approach to explaining human behavior to be too limiting. First, the questions and response-choices were pre-established; second, I had no access to the respondents to ascertain how they interpreted the questions or to clarify the reason behind why they chose the responses they did; and third, the theories that guided the development of the questionnaires also seemed somewhat disembodied from the people I was studying. As a result, I decided to change my dissertation methodology to one that would better satisfy my longing to really understand what was going on for the people. I turned to qualitative methodologies at first, not expecting to end up doing a grounded theory study. Neither did I anticipate the many challenges I would have to go through along the process of learning grounded theory when I finally decided to do it. Early in my dissertation, I started an anonymous blog to keep myself motivated and connected to other graduate students. I made entries of my grounded theory learning process as I experienced it. For relief, I added touches of humor and sarcasm to my entries. Given its personal nature, I struggled as to the appropriateness of identifying my blog in this article. Surprisingly, in researching for this article, I discovered that an editor of a recent textbook on qualitative research mentioned my blog in the preface of her textbook (Lichtman, 2011, p. viii). I reasoned that if my blog had enough value to be mentioned in a textbook, I might as well fully embrace the spirit of collaborative and open learning and reveal my authorship publicly. My blog, The Lonely Dissertator, can be accessed at http://lonelydissertator.blogspot.com (I stopped updating my blog shortly after I completed my dissertation defense in May 2010). My dissertation was entitled Dynasting Across Cultures: A Grounded Theory of Malaysian Chinese Family Firms (Loy, 2010). Data were gathered from interviews, participant observations, opportunistic conversations, and also relevant literature. There were a total of 22 formal interviews with 25 different participants: 10 male successors (aged 20s-70s), 3 female successors (aged 30s-50s), 4 male founders (aged 60s-70s), 1 female founder (aged 60s), 3 family members no longer in the business (1 founder-wife in her 70s, 1 daughter aged 50s, 1 niece aged 40s), and 4 non-family members of the business (1 male staff aged 60s, 1 female staff aged 50s, and 1 friend...