About

The 30-Year Progression

This work didn't start yesterday. It's the result of 30 years spent learning how to build systems that help people make better decisions under pressure.

Military Foundation (1991-2014)

I started at West Point Prep School in 1991, then West Point (1992-1995) studying Systems Engineering. I served in the US Army for 16.5 years (1998-2014) as an Assistant Director of Operations, managing training and development for a Military Intelligence battalion of 2,500 personnel.

The foundation I learned: Mission Command—clear intent, decentralized execution, disciplined initiative, mutual trust, and shared understanding. This is where I learned that good systems don't replace human judgment. They support it.

I also learned to train at scale. We established Standard Operational Procedures that increased operational effectiveness by 30% and scaled a performance skills training program across the Infantry training base to 25,000 soldiers annually.

Entrepreneurship Bridge (2012-2021)

While still in the military, I started working with the Oregon State Athletic's Leadership Institute (2012-2017) as Managing Director. I designed and delivered leadership and entrepreneurship curriculum to student-athletes using Lean Startup methodology and Lean Canvas. Student-athlete teams won 1st and 2nd place at Oregon State Startup Weekend. I pioneered the introduction of Leanstack.com to the university's Technology Transfer office.

After leaving the military, I worked at Productio (2016-2018) as Director of Business Development in the Venture Capital space, onboarding the largest client in company history—a VC firm managing 40 companies. I built relationships with VC, PE, and institutional investment sectors.

I also served as National Ambassador Program Director for Soldiers To Sidelines (2020-2021), empowering 100+ Soldier Coach Ambassadors nationwide with a $250K fundraising goal.

The bridge: applying military discipline to entrepreneurship and leadership development. Learning how to communicate value to investors and scale programs across different contexts.

Manufacturing Application (2018-Present)

I moved into manufacturing operations in 2018, applying Lean principles at scale:

Parker Hannifin (2018-2020): Led operations for a a large-scale assembly value stream. Lean initiatives resulted in a 67% increase in units per labor hour and a 66% reduction in customer complaints.

Johnson Controls (2022): Served as Plant Continuous Improvement/Lean Manager, leading the Kaizen Promotion Office (KPO). Achieved significant cost savings within months and improved productivity by 60%.

Georgia-Pacific (2023-Present): This is where the synthesis happened.

Performance Development Leader (Feb 2023 - May 2024): Spearheaded performance development initiatives and developed leadership training programs.
Shift Coach (May 2024 - Aug 2024): Embedded on the floor, capturing reality vs. dashboards. Used Ultraworking's monthly planning system to document decisions at the moment they were made. Over several months, I captured thousands of pages of observations and identified $1.5-2M in cost savings by comparing what operators actually saw to what the official reports said.
Shift Coach - GenAI Integrator (Aug 2024 - Present): Selected as Koch Companies GenAI Champion. Scaled the method using AI-augmented analysis. Conducted comprehensive downtime analysis and identified $1-2M immediate cost savings. Developed enterprise-scalable solution for hundreds of facilities with $500M+ total cost savings potential—zero capex, Microsoft stack only.

The application: proving that Mission Command + Systems Engineering + Lean + Drucker's feedback analysis works in a high-pressure industrial environment.

AI Integration (2023-Present)

I applied Boyd's OODA Loop, Snowden's Anthro-Complexity, and Wardley's Wardley Mapping to manufacturing operations, using AI (Copilot, OneNote, Teams) to capture decisions in real-time without requiring new hardware.

Boyd's OODA Loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act—a continuous cycle for decision-making under uncertainty. The goal is to iterate faster than the environment changes.

Snowden's Anthro-Complexity: The domain of beings who "are not ants, or birds"—those who make things, play, and tell stories. Addresses the 3Is: Intelligence (reflection and abstraction), Intentionality (purpose and choice), and Identity (recognition and dignity). Complexity science for human systems, not computational models.

Wardley's Wardley Mapping: Strategic mapping for visualizing the evolution of components in a business landscape. Shows value chains, how components evolve from genesis to commodity, and how to position strategically.

The method: voice-to-text capture + SQCA format (Situation, Complication, Question, Action) + operator validation. The operators' knowledge is where the real value is. The AI just makes it faster to capture and analyze.

The outcome: $1.5-2M → $1-1.5M/year → $500M+ enterprise scale.

Academic Validation (2023-2025)

While doing this work, I pursued formal education to validate what I was seeing:

University of Pennsylvania (Aug 2023 - June 2024): Certificate in Organizational Anthropology
Arizona State University (Sept 2023 - Sept 2025): Interdisciplinary Studies, Organizational Leadership

The academic work confirmed what the operational work proved: behavioral signals precede narrative updates. What people actually do (time allocation, workarounds, decisions under pressure) is more reliable than what they say they value.

The Synthesis

The knowledge base documents the discipline: Drucker → Ultraworking → Paper Mill Application.

The backstory shows the method: Copilot + SQCA + operator validation.

The AI Leadership Report shows the outcome: $1.5-2M → $1-1.5M/year → $500M+ enterprise scale.

This page shows the lineage: 30 years of learning how to build systems that help people make better decisions under pressure.

What I'm Building Now

I'm building software to make this discipline accessible to others. The software doesn't invent a new method. It removes friction from a proven one.

The goal: make it as easy to capture a decision as it is to send a text message. Keep the context from getting lost. Make patterns easier to see over time. Keep decisions close to the people making them.

If you want to talk about applying this discipline in your own context, reach out.

Contact

Email: [email protected]

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/akiliking

Tagline

"Give Respect, Earn Trust, Build and Share Knowledge"

Core Philosophy: "To prioritize people over hardware in every organizational challenge I tackle."

Confidentiality Note

All figures, timelines, and specific organizational details presented on this page have been anonymized to protect confidentiality. Ranges and approximations represent the scale and impact of the work while respecting proprietary information and organizational privacy.

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

You are free to:

Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially

Under the following terms:

Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made
ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original

This is an open-source project. See the README for details.