Godfrey Parkin

Godfrey Parkin has over 25 years of international entrepreneurial experience in marketing, management consultancy and business development. His innovative work in corporate performance improvement, technology-enhanced learning and executive training has earned him international recognition.

Godfrey graduated from UCT with a degree in Business Science, majoring in Marketing. He then spent a year as president of AIESEC South Africa, before joining A.C. Nielsen in Johannesburg as a marketing research executive, where he worked intensively with Unilever, Reckitt & Colman, and a host of other blue-chip consumer goods companies.

Nielsen soon transferred him to Switzerland where he headed their international management services operation, providing business development support and training to company managers, consultants and clients in 32 countries. Five years later he formed the Zurich-based global consulting firm, The Edge Corporation, specializing in culture change and marketing and sales team transformation. During this time, the work he did at Credit Suisse helped them quadruple their worldwide securities revenues in less than a year, while lifting them to the banking industry’s top ranking for customer satisfaction.

In the early 1990’s he relocated to London to start up with his wife, Karen, a creative technology company, now trading as Pepper’s Ghost Productions. The company developed and marketed innovative internet-based simulation products, computer games, and animation properties. During his years with this successful start-up, Godfrey led the financial and marketing aspects of the business, working closely with companies such as Time Warner, Fox and DreamWorks.

After selling out to his partners, Godfrey was contracted by the International Institute for Research to turn around a failing division in the USA. Within a year he transformed it into the world’s largest Project Management e-learning company, profitably training thousands of executives from a long international client list that included IBM, Motorola, Cisco, Ernst & Young, and Boeing.

In 2000 Godfrey founded MindRise, a Washington D.C. based consulting and e-learning company, to help other organizations re-evaluate their marketing, training, and Project Management processes and adapt them to the rapidly evolving internet environment. His pioneering work had a significant impact on the evolution of e-learning, and he continues to be a sought-after voice in the field of web-based business. For example, his approaches are core elements in some of the engineering programs offered by Georgia Tech; the leading management consulting firm Kepner-Tregoe and car giant Honda incorporate his principles in their online executive training offerings; he was retained by American Express to help build strategies and procedures for evaluating their extensive business development programme; when a small company went up against the giants in a bid for Porsche’s global learning management business, they retained Godfrey to help them win the contract; and when Canadian telecom giant SaskTel needed to implement an enterprise-wide culture shift to become more competitive as the world went online, they sought out Godfrey's expertise to help them succeed.

In May 2007, he returned to South Africa and, together with Karen Parkin, formed Britefire. While e-learning and e-commerce are not yet mainstream in South Africa, the changes are coming very quickly. Britefire will help large organizations, small-medium enterprises, and individual entrepreneurs equip themselves with the insights, strategies, and skills to exploit emerging opportunities.

Godfrey writes a column (“Parkin Space”) for TrainingZONE, the UK's largest circulation online training journal, and is a member of the team behind the leading edge “Learning Circuits” blog. And for several years he has authored his renowned marketing and performance improvement blog, “Parkin's Lot.”

Godfrey remains integrally involved in furthering the development of e-business and corporate learning, and is an active member of the small global community of thought leaders working on the practical implementation of web 2.0. He is the moderator of the E-learning Discussion Group of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), and is a coordinator of “Trdev,” the internet's premiere training and development community. He is also a regular member of the judging panel for Brandon Hall’s “Excellence in Learning Awards” and is a frequent speaker at conferences world-wide.

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