About · Frank “Rio” Shines

A life spent turning noise into signal.

Oakland to the Air Force Academy. The cockpit to the C-suite. Brazil to the boardroom. Nine chapters of the same craft, practiced in different weather.

Oakland was the first classroom.

I was born at Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City and raised in Oakland by my mother, Vanessa Stroud, alongside four sisters. Single mother. Five kids. Some of the most underserved neighborhoods in the East Bay. None of which was the point of the story — Vanessa was the point of the story.

Behind her was a lineage I’d spend decades growing into. The Stroud family — pioneering African, Creek, and Tawakoni Nation ancestors who threaded a path from a Texas slave plantation, across the Trail of Tears, into the Rockies. Eleven children of K.D. and Lulu Stroud, what the historian John Stokes Holley called the Remarkable Eleven — including the first Black women to integrate Colorado College, men who contributed to the Apollo missions and the Olympic trials, ministers, teachers, soldiers.

A Presidential appointment to fly.

I earned a Presidential appointment to the U.S. Air Force Academy. BS in Management. The first time I’d ever lived somewhere the snow stayed on the ground for months.

At USAFA I captained the NCAA Division I men’s gymnastics team, training alongside athletes who would go on to the Olympic stage. I flew sail planes over the Front Range and learned the Cessna T-41. The Academy is where I first understood that discipline isn’t punishment — it’s what lets you keep your nerve when the visibility drops.

My academic advisor and commissioning officer, Dr. Kevin Davis — USAFA grad, Harvard MBA and PhD, now a professor at the Academy — was the first person who told me, plainly, that discipline beats talent every time, in every weather. I’ve never had reason to doubt that.

USAF Officer. Student jet pilot. Avionics communications & computer systems.

Out of the Academy I went into the United States Air Force. Undergraduate Pilot Training put me in jets. Avionics communications and computer systems taught me how the airplane actually talks — the bus, the radios, the boxes that make a pilot’s hands matter.

I tell people now that this is where my entire career started. Not because of the flying — because of the checklist. Aviation is a culture built on the premise that human beings are unreliable narrators of their own competence and the only honest thing to do is build a system that catches you before you catch yourself. Every Lean Six Sigma engagement I’ve run since is a variant of that idea.

Brazil gave me a name and a second voice.

After the service I went to Rio de Janeiro. I studied under Dr. Carlinhos Pinto Alveres. I learned to hear my own thoughts in Portuguese — a language I still think in when I want to feel something the English vocabulary refuses to name. That’s where the nickname comes from. Rio. It stuck.

I also lived in Australia, the Azores, and Europe. I was a jazz vocalist for a while. I played cello. None of which was preparation for a consulting career, except that I think all of it was. The pattern that I’ve spent thirty years recognizing in spreadsheets is the same pattern I learned to hear in bossa nova. The thing that’s missing is sometimes the thing that’s saying the most.

Thirty years of the same job in different cockpits.

I joined IBM Global Business Services as a Principal. I built the San Francisco / McKesson practice from zero to $100M+, was awarded the IBM Golden Circle twice, and was trained inside the discipline by people who’d written its texts: Dr. Mikel J. Harry (co-creator of Six Sigma) at Motorola University; Forrest Breyfogle, ex-IBM, Crosby Medal recipient; and John Thompson, who carried the IBM transformation playbook to Symantec and Microsoft. I also spoke with Dr. W. Edwards Deming three months before his death in 1993 — a conversation I still think about whenever someone confuses a process problem for a people problem.

From IBM I went to Ernst & Young, then joined the founding team at Pilgrim Software (6× revenue growth), with director-level engagements touching Abbott, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer. I served as VP at CCS Medical and as Director of Continuous Improvement & Analytics at Accredo, an Express Scripts company. I worked from shop floor to executive suite, in software, healthcare, energy, aerospace, and defense, across Fortune 500 and Global 2000 enterprises.

Then AI happened — for the third time in my career. In the last few years I’ve been the GenAI Advisor to Johnson & Johnson (via Turnberry, on roughly 20–25% of a $500M portfolio), engaged with Risepoint (125+ university partners), and architected the ADB / OTSI Azure Databricks modern data platform. In parallel I founded Analytics AIML, LLC, where I serve as fractional Chief AI Officer through the AIM-IT framework: Assess, Innovate, Model, Implement, Track.

Four books. Two on the way.

I write because the math of business is, in the end, a human story — and someone needs to tell it that way. The Controller’s Function (John Wiley & Sons, 2000) was the technical foundation. The New Science of Success (2007) was the career-survival guide for the Web 2.0 economy, written about a future that mostly arrived. Let in But Left Out (2020) was the lockdown memoir-meets-systems-critique — about the country we became when the pandemic showed us our seams.

And AI or Die: The Caveman’s Visual Guide to AI for Everyone (2025), co-authored with Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Umer Qureshi, is the visual primer I wish someone had handed me thirty years ago. It treats AI as the new literacy — accessible without dilution. Two more are on the runway: the AI or Die Enterprise Playbook and Slave House to White House.

I’ve also written introductions and forewords for four of Forrest Breyfogle’s books on Integrated Enterprise Excellence and Lean Six Sigma. Influences, in the spirit of full disclosure: Kara Swisher for cutting through fluff with truth; Michael Lewis for the human side of systems and data; Derek Thompson for the punchy and the smartly contrarian; Paulo Freire for the humanistic and the revolutionary.

The “Remarkable Eleven” — and the work of keeping the record straight.

Through my mother Vanessa Stroud, I am a descendant of K.D. and Lulu Stroud, whose eleven children — the historian John Stokes Holley called them the Remarkable Eleven in The Invisible People of the Pikes Peak Region — quietly built a piece of American history that almost didn’t survive the telling. My great-grandfather K.D. was born into slavery in Texas. His children integrated colleges, served the country, contributed to the Apollo missions, made the Olympic trials. The story extends back nearly four hundred years — to Sambo Game’s manumission in Somerset County, Maryland, in 1670.

I’m a co-producer of the documentary Running to Harvard and dramaturg on RACE, the Opera, with the International Brazilian Opera Company. I’m a family spokesperson for the Colorado College Stroud Scholars, and the family was honored with the Kelley Dolphus Stroud ’31 Club Level on the 4th floor of CC’s Ed Robson Arena in December 2021.

I also founded the Stroud Leadership Academy — a give-back initiative that coaches underrepresented founders and young leaders across the USA, Brazil, and Africa, partnered with the Guetto Institute of Brazil and Sandra Harry’s MindPro. Forbes profiled the partnership in September 2022, and the 200-year-old Diário do Rio covered us in Portuguese a week before that.

The closest cockpit I share.

My wife Michelle works at Mustard Seed Communities, a non-profit that serves children with disabilities and adults living with HIV/AIDS in Jamaica, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Zimbabwe, and Malawi. I’ve never met a person with a more durable sense of what the work is actually for.

Our daughter Rachel is a former state and 8-state regional USA Gymnastics champion who is now interested in AI and criminology and writing college essays I keep being told I’m too biased to grade. The Claude-built SAT vocabulary app I made for her last year is, in honest retrospect, one of the more useful pieces of code I’ve ever shipped.

Current heading.

I run Analytics AIML, LLC with my CTO and co-founder, Umer Qureshi. I serve as a fractional Chief AI Officer to mid-market companies who are paying what I call a complexity tax on AI they haven’t disciplined yet. I architect on Databricks. I write, I speak, I teach. I keep coaching at the Stroud Leadership Academy.

I subscribe to a few stubborn beliefs. AI is generational literacy, not a productivity hack. Discipline is a multiplier, not a tax. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Everything is downstream of the people. And I reserve the right to become smarter tomorrow than I am today.

If any of that resonates — let’s talk.