The war for talent refers to an increasingly competitive landscape for recruiting and retaining talented employees. In the book, Michaels et al., describe not a set of superior Human Resources processes, but a mindset that emphasises the importance of talent to the success of organisations. The war for talent is intensified by demographic shifts (primarily in the United States and Europe). This is characterised by increasing demand along with decreasing supply(demographically). There are simply fewer post-baby-boom workers to replace the baby-boom retirement in the US and Europe (though this is not the case in most of East Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Central America, South America, or the Middle East; Eastern Europe also tends to have similar demographics, namely an ageing and/or shrinking labour force). While talent is vague or ill-defined, the underlying assumption is that for knowledge-intensive industries, the knowledge worker (a term coined by Peter Drucker) is the key competitive resource (see the Resource-based view of the firm). Knowledge-based theories of organisations consistently place knowledge workers as a primary, competitive resource. Talent is never explicitly defined in the book, though the Preface notes, “A certain part of talent eludes description: You simply know it when you see it.” After several further caveats, the authors go on: “We can say, however, that managerial talent is some combination of a sharp strategic mind.