Entrepreneurial Marketing

CHAPTER 5Unifying Capabilities: Converging Mindsets Within an Organization

Do you want to listen to music or a podcast on your phone? What about your laptop, or tablet, or other devices?

For an all‐in‐one solution, turn to Spotify. Founded by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon in 2006, this Sweden‐based company has made audio accessible from anywhere. Consumers can opt for a free or paid subscription.¹ Currently, Spotify has nearly 350 million users; of those, about 155 million are premium users.²

How did this company take music, considered by many to be a basic necessity for thousands of years, and meet today's standards of connectivity? Certainly, the industry has come a long way, shifting from live music to record, from phonographs to tape cassettes and then compact discs, followed by iPods. All these innovations served a purpose. Yet Spotify leveraged technology to make it possible for anyone to access any song from anywhere.

Let's go behind the scenes of this aggressive, globally expanding firm. Clearly it fulfilled a desire among music enthusiasts, as shown how it has grown significantly during the last few years. From 2018 to 2021, the company increased in size from about 3,600 employees to more than 6,500.³

To keep up with this pace, it has recruited employees from various geographic areas with different cultural backgrounds.⁴ This is no small task. Its biggest challenge is to keep attracting the right people (occasionally bringing on hundreds of workers) while maintaining ...