Notwithstanding the fact that the meeting has been postponed by a couple of days, that he arrives for a 3.30pm appointment at ten to four and that when he says a phone call will take 5 minutes it takes 20, Sir Clive Woodward is evangelical on the importance of punctuality.

“Timekeeping is massive,” he says, and then stops himself with a quiet laugh. “I shouldn’t say it, as I was late today . . . but you cannot start a meeting, you cannot start training, you cannot do anything if anyone is late. Martin Johnson, I know, does a whole speech just on timekeeping and what it ended up meaning to the team. I take it to a whole new level: if you arrive late for a ruck, you are going to lose.”

To be fair, Sir Clive was waylaid by a combination of his own celebrity and London’s congestion. The only man to have led an England rugby team to victory in the World Cup had just attended an awards luncheon, where he was inundated by autograph-seekers, only to get stuck in the traffic as a result of strikers on the Underground.

But the comments say much about a man who, these days, is eager to apply the magic of management on the rugby field to the difficulties of everyday life in business. For Sir Clive has no doubt that the lessons learnt on the road to England’s 2003 triumph in Sydney can be made to work anywhere. “There is no reason why someone working for a small leasing company on the outskirts of Maidenhead cannot be the best in the world in their sector,” he says.

The application of touchline wisdom to office life runs the risk of ignoring the plain fact that a 9-to5 job is not a World Cup final. The sales rep who outstrips the monthly revenue target is not going to get a ticker-tape parade through the capital, an OBE and a string of endorsements from Nike. Nor, for that matter, will a hangover cost him his place on the team.

Sir Clive’s philosophy of management, though, may resonate on the shopfloor or in the executive suite because it is so ordinary.

For example, The Basics. One of the seven “winning behaviours” that he and the England team developed in the build-up to the 2003 World Cup was nothing more than identifying what they considered the fundamentals of winning a game of rugby. It took them two years to agree what The Basics are. Not possession, not territory, but simply lineouts, scrums and restarts. The theory went that if England got three basics right 90 per cent or more of the time, they would be hard to beat.

The same principle, Sir Clive now says, applies to business. The first job of an executive and his or her team is to identify the basics of what the company does. “The basics could be how you answer the phone,” he says.

Likewise, Pressure. Another “winning behaviour” that England worked on was putting pressure on the opposition, or as he puts it, “stuffing up their Basics”. Again, Sir Clive sees identifying the essentials of what a company does, what its competition does and then, if you like, spoiling their ball, key step to success.

Sir Clive is proud of his experience in business. He worked for Xerox, then established his own leasing company. It was, he acknowledges, never a match for General Electric. Even at its height, it employed only ten people, but it was, nonetheless, a firm that he had started from scratch. And it is clear that in his years as England coach, he saw himself as much as a managing director as a manager. He recruited a graphologist to help to profile the team, he provided laptops to players and he famously recruited a barrister to accompany England to Australia (he was needed). Sport, he insists, has as much, if not more, to learn from business: “I have read far more business books than sports books.”

Still, sceptics of the “cult of Clive” no doubt will question his claim that the skills of a great sporting manager are “totally transferable”. Sir Clive once claimed that Arsène Wenger would make a great chief executive of ICI. And, yet, Sir Clive’s own effort to transfer his skills from England rugby to Southampton Football Club failed. He lasted little more than a year. Now, he is the director of elite performance for the British Olympic Association. (On the eve of what is expected to be a disappointing sequel for England, he offers a tantalising aside: “I think I could go back to rugby, any time I wanted . . . I said to my wife I think I have another team left in me.”) Nonetheless, Sir Clive, a former England centre, offers practical advice to people like him who have succeeded enough in their chosen field to find themselves, suddenly, managing a team of people.

Managers, he suggests, should not make friends with the people in their team. “I never, ever went out with the players,” he says, “Never, ever.” He invited each of them round to his house for dinner, once or twice. He provided every player with a photocopy of a map of where he lived, so they knew they could stop by any time if there was a problem – as long as it wasn’t to ask why they had been dropped. During his seven years running the team, only four players visited. The closest he got to any of the squad was to Lawrence Dallaglio, when the player ran afoul of the tabloid press.

His theories on managing success and failure are, like him, both unusual and seemingly obvious.

Managers should not deal with success by hosting a trip to the pub, but an office meeting. He says: “When you are winning you have to understand why you have won.” A success, he adds, provides the best opportunity to get “quite tasty” with the players. In short, don’t sing, but criticise when you’re winning. By contrast, he says, managers all too often react to defeat by laying into their team, when they should be taking them out for dinner.

Clearly, Sir Clive does not have any time for mediocrity. In fact, he does not really seem to understand the idea that people might come to work with a view to doing a decent day’s work, rather than with an ambition to be the best in the world. “I think the secret to business is getting the Jonny Wilkinsons, the Martin Johnsons and the Lawrence Dallaglios in the [industry] you are in.”

To anyone in recruitment, this may sound a little pie-in-the-sky – many companies are happy simply to find people who won’t drop the ball. And it is true that Sir Clive seems to have thought a lot about what to do to get the best from the stars of the team, not so much about the journeymen. In that sense the Woodward-style manager would be a terrifying proposition in the office. Good, even excellent, might feel as if it were not enough: his philosophy is about developing the Tiger Woods of fund managers, the Lance Armstrong of chemical engineers, the Roger Federer of estate agents.

Underlying the ambition, though, is a very human appreciation of what essentially matters in the workplace: namely, the other people. “If I am going to spend 70 per cent of my life working, then I want [the people] I work with to be like-minded.” Most important, he says, is to work with people you enjoy working with and with customers who enjoy doing business with you. Which brings Sir Clive to the management idea that was his most innovative at England and the one that most directly challenges common practice in modern companies.

The idea is “teamship”. It works like this: the manager asks the members of the team to establish rules of behaviour, which they must all agree and then present to the CEO, the managing director or the team leader. If the manager is happy with the rule, he or she will sign it off. If not, it will be sent back to be reworked. For the England team this meant working on agreed rules on how to respond publicly and internally when a member of the squad was dropped; it involved agreeing the team’s dress code; it involved agreeing the terms for all players speaking to and writing for the press.

The “teamship rules” ran to hundreds of pages, bound in a “teamship” file and kept by each member of the England squad. Under his system, the authority of the leader is undiluted, but the power of peer pressure is harnessed to the project of winning.

Sir Clive acknowledges that applying the same approach in a company of thousands of people can be difficult. He also knows that management by inclusion and consensus means that decision-making takes much more time and effort. Again, he notes, it took time at England, and no one can expect to be world-beating overnight.

And, of course, he does not need anyone to tell him that enforcing the teamship rules away from the practice ground and in real life is much harder to achieve. The first teamship rule that the England squad agreed was that players would all clock in for meetings ten minutes before they were scheduled to start.