Steve Tibble
Dr. Steve Tibble blends medieval history with corporate strategy to deliver sharp, thought-provoking talks that connect past and present.
Why you should book Dr. Steve Tibble for your next event
- Bridges medieval history and modern strategy, revealing surprising lessons that sharpen decision-making and communication.
- Combines academic depth with corporate experience, transforming complex ideas into clear, compelling messages.
- Experienced advisor to governments and major institutions, bringing real-world relevance to every keynote.
Non-binding request for Steve Tibble
From Crusades to Corporate Strategy – Turning Insight into Impact
Dr. Steve Tibble brings a rare combination of academic expertise and corporate experience to the stage. With a career spanning medieval history and high-level communications strategy, he offers audiences a fresh perspective on how ideas are shaped, refined, and delivered. His work with governments, financial institutions, and leading private equity firms has been shaped by the same analytical discipline that underpins his historical research. The result is a speaker who connects the past with the present in a way that feels both relevant and actionable.
Dr. Steve Tibble – Speaker Profile
Dr. Steve Tibble stands out for a career that moves along two parallel tracks: medieval history and corporate communications strategy. At first glance, these fields appear unrelated. Yet in practice, they reinforce each other in powerful ways. His work shows how deep research, structured thinking, and clear communication form the backbone of both academic inquiry and successful business strategy.
Communications Strategy and Planning
Steve has built an extensive career in corporate and financial communications, working across large-scale and high-stakes environments. His experience includes advising governments on major communications projects, including several privatisations. He has also led branding and communications planning for major corporate and financial institutions, helping them define and express their core messages with clarity and precision.
For more than a decade, he served as Communications Director for one of Europe’s leading private equity firms. In this role, he navigated complex stakeholder landscapes and translated detailed data into strong, focused narratives. His approach is grounded in the belief that effective communication starts with rigorous analysis. By refining information into clear ideas and aligning those ideas with strategic goals, he helps organisations communicate with impact and confidence.
Academic Expertise in Medieval History
Alongside his corporate career, Steve has developed a respected academic profile in medieval history, with a particular focus on the crusades. His research at Cambridge and later at Royal Holloway, University of London, has led to publications with Oxford, Cambridge, and Yale University Press.
His academic work is known for offering new perspectives on historical events, challenging established interpretations and opening up fresh lines of thinking. This ability to rethink and reframe complex material is central to both his academic and professional work.
Where Past and Present Meet
What makes Steve’s perspective compelling is the way his two areas of expertise interact. His corporate experience has sharpened his ability to communicate complex academic ideas in a way that resonates with broader audiences. At the same time, his academic training strengthens his corporate work through disciplined research and analytical depth.
This exchange works in both directions. The present informs the past, helping him interpret historical events with clarity and relevance. The past, in turn, offers insights into leadership, conflict, decision-making, and communication that remain strikingly relevant today.
A Speaker Who Translates Complexity
Audiences value Steve for his ability to take abstract or complex ideas and make them meaningful. Whether he is discussing medieval campaigns or modern communications strategy, he brings structure, clarity, and a strong narrative thread. His talks are grounded in real-world experience and supported by academic rigor, creating a balance that keeps audiences engaged while delivering substance.
Book Dr. Steve Tibble for Your Event
Booking Dr. Steve Tibble means bringing a speaker who connects disciplines in a way that challenges conventional thinking. His insights apply across industries, offering valuable perspectives on strategy, communication, and the power of well-crafted ideas.
He delivers talks that are thoughtful, engaging, and practical, leaving audiences with a clearer understanding of how to turn information into influence and ideas into action.
Keynotes
Keynote by Dr. Steve Tibble:
Corporate Transition – How to strategise change like a crusader
Modern management teams should learn lessons on how to do a lot with very little. Strategy is key to making this happen. But how can we possibly learn strategy from crusaders? We believe that more primitive societies, such as those in the medieval world, were, unlike us, poor at strategy.
This is profoundly mistaken. People who have few resources at their disposal have to make everything count: and they need to have the optimum strategies in place. The crusaders fought a 200-year war. They had long-term vision, dedicated people driven by a single objective, and leadership that not just preached that vision, but lived it.
The corporate world, especially in an environment of consolidation and transition, could learn a great deal from them – and particularly the importance of creating a real strategy, instead of just talking about it.
They can learn how to better empower small teams to fulfil those strategic goals and create a leadership style which rolls out strategy with a horizon of decades rather than a week. Committed people with far less have the discipline to do more than those with infinite resource.
This talk would be dedicated to these topics, using the crusades as a case study and a source of entertaining anecdotal reference.
Keynote by Dr. Steve Tibble:
What’s next for PR and communications strategy?
Branding, PR, marketing and communications are in an accelerating state of flux. But arguably, many of the fundamentals of strategy remain the same. And have done for thousands of years. Modern-day PR firms and companies looking for better brand recognition should take a look at how the medieval world did the job.
The Templars and the Assassins were essentially medieval corporations whose respective brands still permeate our modern world. How did they do it? How did these tiny groups get their names to reverberate across centuries and continents? Not only were they larger than life in their own time, but we still talk about them today through legends, ideologies and even video games.
Arguably, their PR strategies were more penetrating than anything we have seen for last 100 years.
This entertaining talk will help audiences understand the fundamentals of what a truly astounding communications strategy should look like.
Keynote by Dr. Steve Tibble:
Templars - The architects of private equity and investment banking
Imagine being gifted a large, decrepit, unproductive village. A Templar would take that village, invest in the most cutting-edge technology, plant the most high-yielding crop and encourage the villagers to work efficiently – making everyone a little richer and transforming the village into a highly productive asset. And, at a broader level, they would work towards long-term goals, across a wide range of skills and sectors such as finance, law, advisory and conflict resolution.
They established a cutting-edge international banking system, created supply chains and advised queens, kings and courts at the highest level. These were the medieval private equity professionals, elite teams who were peace-mongers as well as war-mongers.
A thousand years before the birth of private equity, the Templars faced many of the same challenges our modern financiers do today – and came up with some astonishing solutions. Our modern world would find these solutions not only familiar, but instructive.
This talk will take our understanding of private equity to a whole new level. It will strip PE down to its basics and demonstrate why the Templars are an ideal example of the level of professionalism that a small, dedicated team can achieve.
Keynote by Dr. Steve Tibble:
Leadership and Management in a time of stress - What lessons can the corporate world learn from medieval leaders confronted with existential threat
The crusaders had an instinctive, but highly effective, grasp on leadership, strategy and motivation. They had clarity around objectives, knew how to empower their teams and were not afraid to lead from the front.
This talk will look specifically at leadership skills found amongst medieval leaders that have a shockingly modern ring to them. What can we learn from them? What have we forgotten that could help leadership teams both through times of crisis, transition and peace? 5 Medieval CEOs – the Templar knights as the original corporate strategists.
This talk is similar to the general leadership lecture, however it will focus on the Templars as a specific, and shockingly appropriate, case study for CEOs and top management. The Templars had a tiny team, limited resource and shockingly difficult objectives.
They were almost consistently outnumbered, out-maneuvered and out-on-a-limb. But, against all the odds, the Templars not only survived for 200 years, but became the most respected, widely-talented corporation in the Middle Ages. How? Leadership at the top was primarily what gave these iconic figures their well-deserved accolades. We have a lot to learn from them.
Steve Tibble — Templars: How medieval strategy lives on in private equity
Watch Dr. Steve Tibble in action
