Bryan Kramer’s book, Shareology: How Sharing is Powering the Human Economy is not only a celebration of the new sharing economy but a primer on how to thrive in it. It’s the result of some serious thinking by a serious thinker, a veteran of Silicon Valley who was feeling patently unfulfilled by the dull trajectory of marked success. Bryan began to do some serious soul-searching: this is a soulful thought influencer, people. I know this to be true as I have spent time “IRL” with him. As he did, he sought out kin and wisdom, colleagues and like minds in social media, and realized that his particular intelligence lay in the fertile intersection of technology with social philosophy. Basically, he realized, what we do in this economy is share. And we are not only what we share, but how we share it, why we share it, what we share, and even when we share it. And he points out, we don’t all know how to share. And in this global and human economy, to share well with others, means everything.
Bryan is remarkable at defining the tech-induced radical transformation of work and brand. We had been sharing information the same way for thirty thousand years or so. But with tech, everything has changed: there are no boundaries now, no borders: we’re connected on a global scale in ways that collapse time and distance. This also means that the way we can influence and effect change has been entirely transformed. It may be a cliché that the whole world is different, but is it’s true. Like his other book, Human to Human: #H2H— which eloquently demonstrates that what drives the economy is not business interactions, but human interactions — Shareology is smart. He articulates concepts with an infectious and courageous intelligence. The idea that information’s shareability is far more critical than we realize also drives home the idea that we are, indeed, people — all communicating and exchanging information with each other. He also explains the varying styles of sharers – which in this mobile and social world is certainly a key personality and behavior trait. The need to connect, he writes, in is our very DNA — but the way in which we do it is entirely different.
This book is able to delineate the importance of company brand: not just as a logo or a heavily invested mirror of core values, but as a tangible, share-able entity. And how much your brand is working — how much it matters — can be measured by how much it is shared — its Shareability Quotient. “If you want people to share your stuff,” he writes, “they need to trust you or identity with the content you’re producing, period.”
I couldn’t agree more. While Bryan uses some buzzy terms (“Special sauce”), he’s also hit on something that is both incredibly profound and incredibly simple. It may well be something intrinsic to millennials, who have grown up sharing everything — and who know how to do it. But for anyone in business who doesn’t (come on, admit it), the first part of this book will be an entertaining, upbeat, and eloquent education. As for the second part, he goes well beyond most in terms of looking at media and behavior, about how its methodology across the board There’s an especially crunchy section on the intersection of automation and human interaction — a must, without question, in this particular era. The ideas are so well thought out that I’d say he created a new discipline here: Share Theory. This is definitely a book that will influence and effect change — in powerful, re-humanizing ways.
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