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Rita J. King
Founder @ Power Pairs.
Rita J. King is a multifaceted professional with extensive experience in business consulting, futurism, and creative endeavors. As the founder of Power Pairs, she focuses on helping individuals and teams navigate professional goals and improve workplace dynamics.13
Professional Background
Rita J. King holds several key positions:
- EVP for Business Development at Science House since April 20111
- Co-Founder of Model Meetings, which aims to amplify meeting productivity1
- Futurist for the Science and Entertainment Exchange of the National Academy of Sciences1
- Global Fellow at the Salzburg Global Seminar1
Expertise and Contributions
King's work spans various fields:
- Business Consulting: She works with senior leaders to bridge the gap between strategy and execution, with clients including four out of ten of Forbes' most admired companies.1
- Futurism: As a futurist, she invents story architecture, gadgets, and futuristic technologies for TV and Hollywood.1
- Writing: King has worked as an investigative reporter and creative writer, with her work featured in major media outlets globally.1
- Innovation: She founded Dancing Ink Productions in 2006, which began with an IBM commission to investigate the business value of emerging internet technologies.1
Power Pairs
Power Pairs, founded by Rita J. King, is a consulting firm that emerged from a partnership between Science House in New York City and The Culture Institute in St. Gallen, Switzerland.2 The company focuses on:
- Aligning teams and improving workplace dynamics
- Using cutting-edge organizational and behavioral science
- Viewing human personalities as a combination of innate impulses and shifting relational dynamics2
King's book "Power Pairs" is set to be published by Wiley in April 2024, offering insights into building collaborative relationships and strong teams in the workplace.2
Personal Brand
Rita J. King is known for her innovative approach to work culture and team dynamics. She emphasizes the importance of imagination and creativity in professional settings, as evidenced by her work at Science House, which is described as a "cathedral of the imagination".1 Her LinkedIn username is indeed ritajking.1
Highlights
Sprezzatura is a concept from the Italian Renaissance that means effortless ease. But excellence is never effortless! It takes a lot of practice to seem as if you were born with innate talent. This concept controlled perceptions over who is an "imposter." But the people who were considered imposters had fewer opportunities to become polished like silver candlesticks to create the impression they were born shiny.
It's not just that companies "need" more than one culture. It's that subcultures are inevitable. Failing to recognize this oversimplifies the concept of culture. IT and HR have different subcultures, for example, and those subcultures have their own work and communication styles. But it's even more granular than that. Every group of people layers further into subcultures. If you have a team of four people, two of them have their own separate subculture.
After a decade of applying The Culture Institute's Culture Map tool with leadership teams across industries, one of the most common subculture layers I've seen repeatedly is a leadership team that wants an entire company to keep the big picture in mind at all times. This simply isn't realistic when people are faced with the need to make constant tradeoffs at a smaller scale in real time. Those smaller scale tradeoffs add up. Culture can be shaped when it is made visible so it can be managed and transformed. People need to know the big picture, of course, but it's much more important to understand how their contribution connects to it. Words on a wall are not culture. I always remind clients that Enron listed integrity as one of its core values.
#culture #subcultures #PowerPairs #knowyourselfgrowyourself
