The concept of a company culture has been around since at least the 1950s, when the psychoanalyst Dr. Elliott Jaques described the behaviour of manufacturing workers in The Changing Culture of a Factory. But it’s only in the last 10 years that the world of business truly started to think of culture as a key factor in the success or failure of a company. Now, some organisations even have chief culture officers—a gesture of how important culture has become.

There’s...