Rather than guaranteeing employment security, many firms now claim to provide opportunities for employees to accumulate skills and experiences that both improve company performance and enhance employees' employability in the labor market. This “employability approach” encourages and often expects individuals to take greater personal responsibility for their careers.

Since many believe that the employability approach allows, and even invites, the loss of talent, organizations are often hesitant to invest to make their employees more marketable. According to this argument, any investments in employees’ general skills and marketable competencies will increase people’s value in the external labor market and presumably their likelihood of leaving.

In this report, the authors explain that their research prompts the opposite conclusion. In a global study of managers and executives, they found that organizations can strengthen their executives’ intentions to stay by equipping them to leave. Their counterintuitive conclusion: the best way to ensure that critical talent doesn’t leave is by providing experiences and opportunities that truly enhance their value and employability in the external labor market.

Most executives concede that culture can do a great deal to enable (or disable) an organization's ability to change or to embrace new ideas and technologies. But when asked what can be done to enhance a culture's positive effects (or diminish negative effects), they either shrug or offer a complicated explanation ending with the caveat that "it takes a long time." But culture doesn't have to be that mysterious. Through original research, Accenture has clarified the relationship between culture and action by tracing the pathway from organizational values to managerial mindsets to specific practices to business results. That pathway constitutes an organization's performance anatomy. This research report explains this pathway for leaders who need to manage organizational culture.