Goldman Sachs hires England rugby coach Eddie Jones

Eddie Jones, the coach who led Japan's national rugby team to a spectacularly improbable victory over South Africa during this summer's World Cup, is to join the advisory board of Goldman Sachs in Tokyo.

The appointment of Mr Jones by Goldman Sachs comes just a week after the 55-year-old Australian was selected as the next head coach of England — a team in need of resuscitation after failing to progress from the group stages of the same tournament.

The roles at both Goldman and England, he said, represented “a once in a lifetime opportunity”.

The departure of Mr Jones to England will leave Japan without his expertise as it prepares to host the 2019 Rugby World Cup — an event whose arrangements have been thrown into confusion by a political spat over the design and finances of Japan's new national stadium.

Mr Jones, who lived in Japan during his tenure as head coach of the “Brave Blossoms” national squad, is expected to return to Tokyo twice a year to attend meetings of Goldman Sachs’ Japan Advisory Board — a panel mostly comprising blue-chip corporate leaders from across Japanese industry.

His input at those meetings, he said, would “definitely not be about banking”, but was instead likely to draw on his experience of managing a mix of cultures and coaxing it into working as a team. Of the 31 members of the squad representing Japan at the Rugby World Cup, more than a third were born outside Japan.

Under Mr Jones’s leadership, the Japanese team won three of its matches during the competition — its strongest performance by a wide margin and a run that included a 34-32 triumph over the Springboks of South Africa.

“The question was how do you get everyone to work for the same thing,” he said from the Tokyo headquarters of Goldman Sachs, describing his time as Japan rugby coach. “You had to work out what was negotiable and what was not.”

During that learning process, he said, it became clear that, for the Japanese-born contingent, punctuality was high on the list of non-negotiable cultural factors.

Masanori Mochida, who played rugby for Keio University and is president of Goldman Sachs Japan, said that Mr Jones had "achieved the impossible by bringing the Japanese team to a level on par with the best in world rugby."

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2015