Wanting

Burgis presents Rene Girard's theory of mimetic desire for a general and specifically business audience. Girard's claim is that human desire is not spontaneous but imitative: people want things because other people want them, and the model who demonstrates the desire is more important than the object itself.

Burgis distinguishes two categories of model. Celebristan contains models who are socially distant, including celebrities, historical figures and executives at other companies, and imitating them produces no direct conflict since the models cannot compete with the imitator. Freshmanistan contains models who are socially close, including colleagues, peers and friends, and imitating them produces rivalry precisely because the parties are near enough to compete for the same things.

He develops the escalation mechanism, in which two parties imitating each other's desires intensify the rivalry until the object becomes irrelevant and the conflict is about the rivalry itself. Girard's account of the scapegoat mechanism, in which the accumulated tension of a group is resolved by uniting against a single victim, is covered as the resolution societies have historically used.

Burgis' practical material covers identifying your own models explicitly, distinguishing thin desires that are imitated from thick desires that have persisted across time and circumstance, and building what he calls a system of thick desires through examination of fulfilling past experiences. The theory is difficult to falsify, since any desire can be attributed to some model. Burgis applies it to business cases including the Facebook and Winklevoss dispute in ways that are illustrative rather than demonstrated. The distinction between socially near and socially distant models is the most immediately usable idea.