Rita Booker-Solymosi

Rita Booker is a leadership trainer, intercultural coach and organisational developer who grew up as part of the Hungarian minority in Romania. She emigrated with her parents to Austria in 1978. In 2001 she returned to Romania as a leadership and communication trainer for the international automotive industry and co-founded European Standards Consulting, a Romanian-German human resource provider in Timisoara, Romania. As a coach and trainer, she has helped her clients maximize the personally and professionally transformative potential inherent in the experience of living and working across cultures.

Rita's intercultural expertise is focused on the Eastern European transition during the post-communist era. She has prepared executives, managers and leadership teams of multinational companies for their first entry into Romania and for the differences between Romanian and other world cultures. Rita has accompanied the process of post-merger integration in Romania for the energy, petrochemical and banking industries.

Her educational background includes psychology, education, law, marketing, sales and music, which she studied in Salzburg, Austria and Berlin, Germany. She has been married to an Afro-American artist and has lived in Berlin since the Fall of the Berlin Wall and communism. Rita is fluent in Romanian, Hungarian, German, English, French, Italian and studies Russian and Hindi.

In addition to serving on community boards and committees, Rita regularly publishes articles on intercultural leadership topics and is a frequent conference speaker. She is co-author of the business and management book "Intercultural Teams in Sports," to be published in 2006. As member of the International Coach Federation and the Junior Chamber International, she continuously supports young entrepreneurs.

Co-author of Cultural Detective Romania