What Your CFO Always Wondered About HR But Never Dared To Ask: The Spotify HR Book Is Now Available
Today, I’m extremely excited to introduce our Swedish language readers to our latest peek inside HR at Spotify – a book! BOLD: Strategiskt HR-arbete i en ny tid (translates to: BOLD: Strategic HR in a new era), showcases a new school of thought within the HR industry. It’s about how we view our profession and how HR can be something out of the ordinary. Penned by the HR Lead Team at Spotify, it’s a resource by practitioners for other practitioners, and we hope it can be inspirational to anyone, at any level, within the HR industry who is willing to be bold and take some risks.
The inspiration was a combination of the countless acquaintances reaching out asking to see real life examples of how to do business-driven HR, and also those of us using fresher approaches, being faced by a barrier to establishing a new school of thought. Many acquaintances at conferences and lectures have begun to take note, but then they protest (with increasing volume) that standing out from the crowd as an HR professional is associated with a career death penalty. The view, especially prevalent within tech organisations, is that an HR professional should preferably not be seen and should work both for and against not being needed. Nonsense.
When considering all of this, the desire to spark some real change in this area has hit me hard. The time is ripe. And the whole team who’ve jumped on the bus with me, daring to be bold, and as a result have an incredible impact on the business and the people – they need to have their voices heard. Together, we can shape the future of our profession as well as the future of work. And that’s what this book is about.
We hope it will inspire you to pressure test your own chosen truths, build on all that is good, and at the same time be curious and step out of your comfort zone. Maybe you can find other, new, and different, ways to get ahead here. We leave it up to you to follow or to question, to smile in recognition, or to shake your head with scepticism. And yes, this might not apply to all industries, but please do not hide behind that argument. Our approach has taken Spotify from a start-up, through a scale-up, and is now doing its job in a mature organisation as well – so you don’t have to be doing HR at a start-up or in a truly global company. Regardless of industry, or size, this is definitely the right time and place for HR!
We hope that you as a reader will find yourself critically questioning, zooming out a little, unearthing new impulses and overall strengthening how you conduct HR. Even if you don’t join our school of thought, we’re pretty sure you’ll find something you like or that makes you take a second glance at something you’re doing within your own organisation.
The book, written in Swedish, is available to buy from Adlibris and Bokus, and we dare to shamelessly promote the book since we have decided to give our royalties to Min Stora Dag. We hope to publish an English version in the future, especially since it was written in English to begin with…but that is a whole different story.
