[Excerpt] In The Mismanagement of Talent, Brown and Hesketh argue that rooted within the dominant discourse of the "war for talent" are several core assumptions that have shaped our perspective on employability in the KBE. The most central of these is that there is a limited pool of talent capable of rising to senior managerial positions, which creates fierce competition to recruit the best and brightest. The perception of talent as a limited commodity is seen as driving organizations to diversify their talent pools and adopt more rigorous recruitment and selection tools in an effort to get the right people, with the right knowledge, into the right jobs. That perception also shapes public policy, as governments focus on expanding access to higher education and dismantling barriers to talent presented by fundamental forms of inequality so that their work forces are positioned to compete in the global economy. Also affected are future knowledge workers themselves, who are pushed to acquire the employability skills that will ostensibly guarantee them the high-skilled, high-wage jobs generated within the KBE.