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Love him or hate him, there's no ignoring Dr David Starkey. The 60-year-old historian may be famous for offending fellow panellists during public debates, but nobody disputes his dedication to the truth, even when he pursues it with the noisy ruthlessness of a coyote.

"Dr Starkey is probably the world's greatest historian," said Steve Chamberlain, the Events Director of the London Business Forum, addressing a 200-strong audience at the Waterloo iMax theatre. "However, when I was writing the promotional material for this event he suggested he should be more modest and be referred to as 'one of the world's greatest historians'".

Upon reaching the podium, Starkey quickly retorted: "I assure you that will be the last sign of modesty you'll see this evening. I think it's a much overrated British virtue."

Modesty was certainly not a concern for the subjects of Starkey's speech: British monarchs of the late Renaissance who wielded enormous power but who nevertheless relied on leadership techniques used by many of today's chief executives.

"There is a very brief history of business," Starkey began. "The large corporation is a new thing. As we understand it, entrepreneurship is barely 120-130 years ago." However, he pointed out, "larger companies are not only political organisations but very like states. If we look at the history of states and government we've got a very long history [to learn from]."

Henry VIII was the monarch whom Starkey regarded as the most effective at realising his agenda. "Think of a typical repositioning exercise of a company - what is that in comparison to changing the religion of an entire people?" he asked. Henry's leadership style was "disturbingly modern" in that he was "one of the first kings to set himself the goal of achieving fame."

At first, the king sought to develop his celebrity the old-fashioned way, through war. But his reign came to be defined by personal matters - in order to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, he had to undertake an "extraordinary exercise". "We think of him as the brutal pusher forward... [and] a creature of raging impulse," Starkey said, but "he is infinitely subtle. He slowly gropes forward, step by step, foot by foot, testing weakness, winning people over, spying out which point in the English structure of power is weakest and coming up unerringly with the view that it's the Church. Picking [the clerical objectors] off first, and only then going fully and formally public... Between his proposing to Anne Boleyn, which takes place on New Year's Day 1527, and marrying her in 1533, it is six years of bloody slog."

By contrast, Starkey's next case study, Edward VI, had no time to spare. He died at the age of 15, but nevertheless had the leadership skills to ensure he would be succeeded by Lady Jane Grey instead of his half-sisters Mary and Elizabeth. "How does a 14 1/2-year-old boy do that? He does it by sheer domineering force of will," Starkey said. "If you think we have young leaders nowadays, going a short way back into royal history will persuade you that even David Cameron is in his dotage. Edward is clearly playing a leading role in the shaping of policy from the age of 12, and he is a slow starter in royal terms. Henry V actually leads an army at the age of 11; Edward IV wins a major victory at the age of 13."

Nevertheless, after Edward's death, Mary quickly usurped Lady Jane Grey by attracting popular and military support to her campaign to reinstate Catholicism as the national religion. "Mary comes to the throne by what she sees as a miracle," Starkey pointed out. "If you go back to an awful lot of leaders, this notion of a calling, of being chosen, of having a destiny is an essential part of it. You can see it in leaders as diverse as Margaret thatcher, who had her jewellery "felt" [auspiciously] at a Conservative garden fete, to Napoleon, who was born with the caul on his head, which in Corsica is a sign of good luck."

Mary's priority in power was to find a husband and produce an heir, but her choice of Prince Philip of Spain split her advisers and the general public. "Then, as now, the British are mildly xenophobic. They really are," Starkey commented. "Then we showed it by throwing stones at foreigners, now we show it much more effectively by patronising them." Mary pushed through her agenda, but it meant crushing popular dissent in the form of Sir Thomas Wyatt, who led a near-successful rebellion from Kent.

To consolidate matters, she used what would now be described as political "spin", most obviously with a grand royal wedding at Winchester, more subtly with a papal endorsement delivered by a cardinal with the words of the Archangel Gabriel: "Hail Mary, thou who art highly favoured amongst women". Mary believed she was pregnant, and publicised this belief in order to pave the way for what she imagined to be a divinely guaranteed dynasty, but after 17 months it was clear she had been mistaken. At this point, Starkey explained, "the entire regime collapses, the future has gone, the certainty has gone, the possibility of swaying opinion has gone. And Mary is left to become 'Bloody Mary'." The business lesson here, he said, is to never base your entire agenda on only one policy.

Starkey's third case study was James I, "a very striking king, because he comes to the throne with an enterprise as enormous and grandiose as that of Mary: he wants to bring about a genuine union between England and Scotland." Since Mary, Edward and Elizabeth had produced no children, the English throne passed to the House of Stuart with "predictably disastrous consequences of putting a Scot in power in England," Starkey said. "We all know what the dangers of that are as we are experiencing [today] quite radically. But James is very different from the kind of Scots we have around at the moment. James is very striking in that he actually likes England. Some Scots like England enough to wish to buy it, or run it, but not to adapt to English custom."

Like Henry VIII, James had clear and determined goals: peace with Spain, which he got, and a religious reconciliation between England and Scotland, which he went a long way towards getting (witness the King James Bible). "But the issue of union is something quite different," Starkey explained. "The opponents of union in the 17th Century, just as the opponents of union when it's eventually carried out in 1807, are the English and not the Scots, because they believed they would be taken to the cleaners."

James failed to budge English opinion through propaganda and international conferences. However, unlike Mary, he had a reserve position. "He finds himself blocked from bringing Scots into the council that ruled England, so he creates instead an entirely Scottish private staff," Starkey explained. "It's the equivalent of the Downing Street staff of today. All of whom are Scots, most of whom are young, all of whom are male and very attractive, because we all know James had his little peccadilloes for broad Scots lads."

Using this apparatus, James could "pull the levers of power on everything that he fundamentally cared about," while he and his cronies were off hunting and racing horses.

It was a style of leadership expedient to James's circumstances, but Starkey closed his speech by pointing out that it still lacked the dogged brilliance of Henry VIII, who in his establishment of the Church of England was "the absolute model of how to take something utterly disliked, detested and indigestible forward." Henry's approach, he reiterated, was one of "slow pursuit of strategy, slow building up of a position, slow undermining, winning over, manipulating... then suddenly pouncing at the right moment." The essential business lesson that monarchy gives us, he concluded, is that to be great "takes a very long time".