Image is important to all organisations, which is why companies employ a veritable army of public relations officers, corporate identity consultants, and reputation managers to improve their public perception. Top executives spend vast amounts of time carefully refining their corporate statements and inducting new employees into their corporate culture.

Yet a great deal of executives’ preoccupation with corporate culture can be traced to the historical influence of the elite management consulting firms. The concept of corporate culture, in turn, was itself a product of consultants’ attempts to establish the professional credibility of their field long before the concept of corporate culture was commonly understood.