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A lot of business [and] sports teams talk about great teams. What I’ve tried to do is define what makes a great team. I’ve called it “one team” - how you bring all the component parts together.

I basically have three key criteria, which are all measurable. What I do is a diagram of three circles. The ideal is where all three circles are interlocked. What I’ve found in sport and business, especially when you start, is that they might be miles apart.

One is leadership. A lot of people talk about leadership; there are a lot of books. I would be the last to underestimate leadership - I think leadership is fundamental to any team, and the leader is there to put in all these terms that I think we’re all comfortable with: the vision, the strategy, the culture, the standards . . . So leadership is critical.

The second area is a concept called “teamship”, which I’ve never read about and which I’ve developed into my own style. I think teamship is my style of leadership. Teamship allows the team to consistently set their own standards and rules.

Let me show you how it works. To me, time-keeping says so much about an organisation and an individual. If people are late for meetings, it just shows no respect for people if they’ve not bothered to make the phone call to say why they’re late.

Obviously people can arrive late. But if you’re trying to be the best sports team in the world, as the England rugby team did become, you can’t allow anyone ever to be late. So the players would discuss, without me in the room, what their definition of time-keeping was. In the England rugby team they came back with “10 minutes early”, so if I set a meeting for, say, 10 o’clock in the morning, everybody had to be in the room, ready to go at ten to ten. And that’s what happened.

They would present that rule back to me. If I agreed with it, I would sign it off. And it went in a book.

This teamship just grew. This is not an easy thing to put in place, and it’s certainly not abdicating responsibility, because the leader has got to continue to drive it. It does mean . . . asking the team to discuss things, and then presenting back to you. But once they’ve agreed it, that’s it. It’s in black and white, and nobody will ever break that teamship rule.

I guess in a way it’s . . . peer group pressure. It can’t become a teamship rule unless there’s 100 per cent buy-in, and you’ve got to make sure the team know that and you can’t sign it off unless you agree with it.

We got a lot done in a four or five-year period just setting [aside] a couple of hours here, a couple of hours there to discuss topics . . . like time-keeping, mobile phones, use of e-mail, dress, language, how you talk to the media. All things that, when they add up, can really make the difference between looking average and looking fantastic. Then you can get into the more tasty ones.

We had a lot of debate about players doing books, players doing newspaper columns.

How many times has that undermined sporting stars? That can ruin a whole team. We got that all covered off. I have no doubt that the teamship rules were one of the key reasons that we were successful in Australia.

The third one is partnerships . . . not only external partnerships, but probably more importantly internal. And again, within sports teams, this is understanding everybody helping you win.

If I use the rugby analogy, it is understanding the finance department, understanding the ticket office. If you help them, when you want something in return, it tends to come back in bucketloads.

It’s probably more obvious when it is external partnerships. External partnerships were things like British Airways, our airline partner, our hotel, Pennyhill Park.

This wasn’t us just take, take, take, this was to me . . . the hotel’s a great example. This was a fantastic hotel, and they had top City companies staying there. The England players knew exactly how to behave in that very high-profile environment.

We were able to work in partnership with the hotel. The hotel loved it, the clients loved it. Simple things, such as dos and don’ts.

You would never see a player walk through the bar unless he was in full tracksuit and at least training shoes. They would never walk through the bar in shorts and flip-flops, or sweaty whatever.

There are just simple rules to how you can work with your partner.

If they had walked through the bar it wouldn’t have been a problem with the hotel, but it’s our rules that we set, to allow us to show our partner that we were serious about helping them.

And they got great feedback from people who wanted to come back and stay in their hotel, when they knew England were there.

The three things are measurable. You do a thing called an inspirational measurement survey.

In 1999, four years out from the World Cup, the three circles were off the page. By the time we won it they were interlinked. Where they link in the middle is what I call the “winning zone”.

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