Why do strong leaders make enemies? Because they do what’s right, not what’s easy.

It’s like being the one to say no more pajama days at the office.

Necessary? Yes.

Popular? Definitely not.

Why Strong Leaders Make Enemies

• Why Read:

  • This article provides critical insights on the importance of strong values and character in leadership, a vital skill for any startup founder navigating challenging decisions.

• Featuring:

  • Admired Leadership (@AdmiredLeaders), a development program focused on leadership behaviors that create loyal followership & results

• Link: 

  • “Leaders Without Character and Strong Values Have No Enemies and Make Poor Decisions”

Key Concepts and Tactics:

• Understanding the Importance of Strong Values and Character in Leadership:

  • Point: Leaders must stand for their beliefs and values, even when faced with opposition or pressure to conform.

  • "Leaders with strong values and high character seem to be in short supply, most notably political leaders. But it isn't only in the political arena where leaders fall short. Any leader has the choice to stand for what they believe in or to cave to what others insist that they do."

• Recognizing the Consequences of Lacking Strong Values:

  • Point: Leaders without strong values struggle to make decisions and often prioritize pleasing others over doing what is right.

  • "Because decisions naturally create winners and losers and have consequences that shape the future for people, landing on a choice or conclusion is bound to upset at least a portion of any set of stakeholders. For those with weak character, this means only making a decision if they are forced to, and then making a choice that most people will like rather than one that is the best or right answer for the problem at hand."

• Staying True to Values in Decision-Making:

  • Point: The best leaders make decisions based on their long-standing values, even if it means upsetting some people.

  • "Far too often, leaders allow the volume of dissent, the demands of social media, and the desire to please and accommodate everyone to override their values and what they know is right. The best leaders accept that making hard decisions will result in consequences that will upset at least some people. Choices do that."

• Grounding Decisions in Time-Tested Values:

  • Point: Leaders should base their decisions on values and principles that have stood the test of time and that they have held dearly in the past.

  • "To live comfortably into the future with that decision or choice requires a grounding in the values and principles that have stood the test of time and have been held dearly by you in the past. Anything less means submitting to the loudest voices who demand their views be agreed to and acted upon."

• Accepting the Inevitability of Making Enemies:

  • Point: True leadership requires making decisions that may upset some people and create enemies.

  • "True character lights the path to strong decisions. Accept that you're going to upset some people and make some enemies. Leadership requires it."

The Product Tactics That Led to Canva’s Success

Why Read: 

• This article provides invaluable product-focused strategies and insights that can help startup founders build a delightful user experience and drive sustainable growth for their business.

Featuring:

• Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan), Author at Lenny’s Newsletter and Lenny’s Podcast interviews Cameron Adams (@themaninblue), Co-founder & Chief Product Officer at Canva

Link: 

• “Inside Canva: Coaches not managers, giving away your Legos, and running profitably | Cameron Adams (co-founder and CPO)”

Key Concepts and Tactics:

• Embrace a product-led approach and focus on delivering a great experience to users: 

  • "For us, the product is the experience and giving people a great experience is an intrinsic part of the product. It's also an intrinsic part of how we've grown. People having a good experience and being enthusiastic about it has been how we've spread the word of Canva."

• Build an MVP that sparks joy and delight, not just a bare-bones product: 

  • "It really needs to spark joy and delight in people and just pure excitement. It can't just be like, oh, yeah, this is a useful tool for me. It needs to light up their eyes. They need to be like... How do I sign up for this thing tomorrow? How do I get it? How do I pay for it?"

• Nail the onboarding experience to get users to their "aha" moment quickly:

  • "For us, it was taking that first step, like particularly with Canva and any, I think, creative tool, there's a real fear of the blank page...And within three or four steps, they built up something that they'd never been able to do before. And it surprised them. The words that we literally got out of user testing were, I didn't know I could be a designer."

• Identify your target persona early on by seeing which users are most delighted by your product:
   

  • "Through that, we tailored the onboarding process to get people excited and to understand the deeper... goal with Canva and the deeper impact it could let them have. It wasn't just about letting them put a pretty picture on the page. It really unlocked their ideas and let them do things they couldn't do before. And that's why they got super excited."

• Invest in SEO by mapping user search intent to landing pages that deliver on the promise: 

  • "So if they search for... want to make a Halloween poster. The top Google result would be Canva. They'd click on it. They'd land on the Halloween poster landing page. It would tell them how they were going to do it, show you how the product was going to do that, have a button there that immediately took them into a Halloween poster template, went through our fantastic onboarding of like customizing that poster really simply."

• Pursue internationalization early on to unlock faster growth in certain markets: 

  • "Internationalizing into Brazilian Portuguese meant that we had to focus a ton more on the Android mobile experience, which was really different for us because we focused a lot on the desktop experience for the first four years. People also in Brazil run entire businesses from their mobile phone and the types of content they're creating to interact with their audience is totally different. So it's actually shaped our product and changed our product trajectory as a result of thinking about internationalization and it has just fueled tremendous growth."

• Adopt a freemium model that aligns with your company mission and delivers value before monetizing: 

  • "Freemium for us wasn't so much a growth strategy or a monetization strategy as much as it spoke to our core mission of empowering the world to design. We truly want to democratize design, which means we want to get design into the hands of as many people as we can, because we think that the world is a better place when more people can create really rich visual content."

• Integrate AI in a way that helps users achieve their goals faster and better, rather than just for the sake of using AI: 

  • "It isn't just about slapping a chat bot on something that already existed. It's about deeply thinking about how AI can help them get to that goal even faster. And we view AI as the next way of democratizing design and empowering the world to design, helping more people design, helping more people design quicker, helping more people design quicker with better quality."

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