The study highlighted a telling anecdote, from the months after Kerr was hired to coach the Warriors in 2014. As a first-time head coach, he wanted to be prepared. So he went to Seattle and shadowed Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll for three days. During the visit, Carroll asked Kerr how he planned to coach his team.

Kerr was confused: “Like what type of offense will we run?”

“No,” Carroll said. “That’s not what matters most. The key is what type of culture you create and what the guys feel every day when they show up to the arena.”

It was an idea Kerr understood but had never heard expressed until Carroll.

“He told me how it took him 10 years to figure out for himself that to succeed, a coach has to have core values that come alive each and every day and with which the players truly connect,” Kerr said. “Because if the players cannot connect, values just become words on a page.”

In the landscape of modern sports, perhaps no word has become more venerated, ingrained and overused than “culture.” It is uttered at every introductory news conference, praised and cited after big wins, and emphasized by coaches, executives and reporters alike.

But one of the most fascinating things about the corporate world, culture expert Spencer Harrison said, is how many leaders do not understand Carroll’s insight.

Harrison is a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD in France and spends most of his days thinking about culture. His research concerns how leaders foster creativity, coordination and connection. When he’s not looking at Grammy-winning bands or asking how people survive plane crashes, he’s consulting with executives about culture.

When Harrison speaks to business leaders, each one will state the importance of culture and their role in building it. But when he asks them how they achieve it, most do not have a good answer. The reason, he says, is most have never been taught.

“They just know from experience that clearly there is this thing that almost seems undefinable that has an impact on how people are behaving,” Harrison said.

At its core, a culture is what Carroll shared with Kerr: A set of collective core values that guide an organization’s mission, priorities and decision-making.

“I like to say culture is a 24-hour-a-day training program,”  said Amy C. Edmondson, a professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School. “It’s the shared assumptions or beliefs about what matters, what works and who matters that shapes behavior in the absence of formal rules.”

Edmondson believes every effective organization has three pillars:

1. A clear value proposition that states why the organization exists and what its purpose is. Harvard is a school that exists to educate future leaders.
2. A system to carry out that purpose (training programs and equipment, for example).
3. A defined culture.

“The culture is what allows us to deliver on that value proposition,” Edmondson said. “Because everybody understands what we do, how we do it, and they don’t need to be reinstructed every minute of the day. In a way, it’s a source of efficiency.”

When Kerr arrived in Golden State, he identified four core values he wanted to build his culture around: joy, competition, compassion and mindfulness. He chose them after consulting with Carroll. The biggest reason was they felt authentic to him.

The challenge for a coach or a business leader is how to get people to embody those values in the spaces where culture is made: meeting rooms, team facilities, daily interactions. Or, as Kerr once put it: How do you take a saying on a locker room wall and make it feel real?

One day earlier this winter, Spencer Harrison was consumed by another culture story: Jimmy Butler and the Miami Heat.

In addition to being an expert on culture, Harrison is a diehard NBA fan, charmed by every morsel of the league drama and intrigue. When he attended a conference on culture at Cal-Berkeley and found himself listening to a panel discussion with Kerr, he raised his hand and asked about the time Michael Jordan infamously punched Kerr in the face.

The Miami Heat have one of the most publicly stated cultures in the NBA, a branding (“Heat Culture”) that began when Pat Riley, first as coach and then as team president, built the team into a championship contender. Riley outlined his core values in plain terms: The Heat would be “the hardest working, best conditioned, most professional, unselfish, toughest, meanest, nastiest team in the NBA.”

The culture, at first, appeared to be a comfortable fit for Butler, the ultra-competitive, hard-charging star. The Heat relaxed rules for Butler, allowing him to fly and lodge separately on road trips. But the relationship between organization and star soon fractured, leading to multiple team-issued suspensions, an awkward standoff and, finally, a trade to the Golden State Warriors.

— Elise Devlin contributed reporting.