Rita J. King

About

Rita J. King shapes culture for high performing teams and organizations through color-coded problem definition to align people with goals. Rita is the founder and president of Power Pairs Inc. and a leadership advisor who has spent two decades helping teams across industries, including multiple Fortune 50 companies, navigate periods of tumultuous transformation. An ethnographer who studies culture, she specializes in the relationship between humans and our evolving technology. Rita has served as a Futurist at NASA Langley's National Institute of Aerospace, an Innovator-in-Residence at IBM, and a Senior Fellow at the Salzburg Global Forum, the Aspen Institute, and the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, where she led a 25-country study on the transformation of culture through digital communities. She has designed and delivered keynotes and workshops for organizations including Amazon, GE, FedEx, 3M, and Samsung, and her investigative journalism has been broadly cited. Her work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, Fast Company, CNN, and NPR, among many others. She holds an honorary doctorate in Applied Imagination from Centenary University. Rita sees this unique moment in history, between the Industrial and Intelligence Eras, as the dawn of the Imagination Age, a time that demands creative approaches to leadership, problem-solving, and teamwork. AI as Applied Imagination, not just artificial intelligence. Rita has been interviewed and featured in 18 books including Manoush Zomorodi’s BORED AND BRILLIANT (Macmillan), Rob Walker’s THE ART OF NOTICING (Penguin Random House) and The New York Times bestselling author Chris Guillebeau’s THE HAPPINESS OF PURSUIT (Penguin Random House). For over a decade, Rita served as Executive Vice President of Science House in New York City, where she advised Fortune 50 CEOs, CIOs, and senior executives on aligning organizational goals with ways of working. As a futurist at the National Academy of Sciences Science and Entertainment Exchange, Rita has collaborated with some of the most creative minds in Hollywood and TV to design future scenarios, technologies, and characters. She has held fellowships at institutions like The Aspen Institute, The Salzburg Global Forum and The Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, applying her imagination to issues of security, culture, and ethics. Early in her career, Rita was an investigative journalist and wrote intimate stories about people's lives so families could connect on a deeper level.