Work Shoes On, Hands Open: Mihran Hovnanian on Leading Through the AI Transition

A mother at a college event nudged her 16-year-old son and said, "See? People fail." She had just asked Mihran Hovnanian whether he had ever failed at work. He said yes, several times, and gave examples. Her son needed to hear it.

Hovnanian, Acting Chairman of the Manchester AI Guild, tells the story because it names a problem he sees everywhere. Young people scroll through feeds of polished success and compare themselves to people whose struggle they never see. "They don't see the late nights, the early mornings, all that goes into building them," he says. "They compare themselves to the polished version... there's no straight way forward, and then they just give up." An overnight success, he points out, usually comes after twelve years of pushing and practicing.

His own story includes a failure he has not forgotten.

The Mistake He Still Carries

About fifteen years ago, Hovnanian helped plan and implement AI systems that led to more redundancies than he had wanted. In the process, parts of the company culture were destroyed. The people affected had effectively been told they were replaceable, then they were replaced. What he learned only in hindsight was that their culture and tacit knowledge could not be replaced.

"You only know this in hindsight, and I kick myself ever since."

That regret drives his work today. He created an AI consultancy and merged it with about fifteen practitioners who each bring ten to thirty years of experience. They now work together under the Manchester AI Guild. Their goal is that when a company adopts AI, its culture comes out intact. Strengths are enhanced and weaknesses are examined. Whatever does not need digitizing is left alone. Customers, suppliers and employees should find their experience of working together healthier than before.

Steel Toe Caps and Servant Leadership

Hovnanian's career runs from hands-on technology roles at GE to leading digital transformation in manufacturing, aerospace and energy. At RLC Aerospace, he walked onto the shop floor on his first day wearing steel-toe work shoes. His IT team was surprised. They only went to the floor when a computer broke.

"Our job is not computers," he told them. "Our job is to get parts out of the door as fast as possible." He asked the people on the shop floor, doing the work, what frustrated them and what they needed from the system. Too many IT teams, he says, hand people a mountain of information and wish them luck. He told his junior staff to put their work shoes on whenever someone reported a problem, and to go find out in person instead of relying on email.

He calls his leadership "100% servant leadership." He wants the people around him to grow, and he does not mind if they become his boss in a few years. His accountability runs to God first, then to his boss, then to his people. He often returns to Acts 2, where believers shared everything and "lacked nothing." People forget that last line, he says. His competitor is not another firm. It is the problem itself, like unreliable energy, and that makes his colleagues teammates instead of rivals.

When the Problem Isn't the Problem

Hovnanian's commitment to people over technology shows in a recent engagement. A structural engineering firm asked him to fix the orchestration problems among its many software streams. Halfway through the morning workshop, he realized they did not have a software crisis. They had an identity crisis. The firm was drifting from structural engineering toward building automation and had not noticed the shift.

So the work became a branding exercise, not a technology project. Once the company understood who it was, the software conflicts had a chance to resolve.

He applies the same test to technology in general. Tracking an Uber solves a real frustration. Adding Bluetooth to a car might be an upsell. He admires the engineers behind the technology more than the technology itself. He uses his father's fountain pen from the 1940s every day, and he stood in Rome looking at the Pantheon's bronze doors, still working after 2,000 years, and asked what he has made that will last.

Not Replaceable, but Changing

Hovnanian does not downplay what is coming. "They have the right to be anxious," he says of teams facing AI. All intellectual labor will be valued differently, just as manual labor was after mechanization. Churning numbers to reach the same answer every time is going away. Creativity, a company's distinctiveness and the human feel for a customer's needs will matter more.

His conviction is that people are not replaceable, even though activities are. "We are human beings, not human doings," he says, admitting it is a cliche that is not entirely false. He also expects craft to grow. As mass production spread in the 1830s, people wanted handmade glass and textiles through the Arts&Crafts movement.  He sees a similar pull toward local, durable, handmade things today. The classic car industry in the UK, he notes, is now worth more than the new car industry.

What worries him more is isolation. We have more ways to connect than ever and, in his view, more loneliness too.

Generosity as the Normal Response

Hovnanian says he has no work-life balance because work is simply part of his life. His father retired at 84 and said he had never worked a day in his life. He had been a doctor and a politician, and he did whatever helped society.

Hospitality is built into Hovnanian's home. He has spare rooms ready for guests. Once, he left home for four days to stay with an old friend and colleague who was going through withdrawal. When asked how many times he would do it again, he says, "As many times as he needs." He ties it to his own story. When his family arrived from Armenia into France in 1923 with one bag for five people, a congregation supplied cover through the winter.

Recently, church friends bought a house that needed major work while the wife was pregnant. The men from the church were mobilized to get it ready. When the friend said he could not repay them, Hovnanian answered, "We were helped twenty years ago. In twenty years, you'll help the next generation."Bringing the Hard Things to Prayer

Bringing the Hard Things to Prayer

Asked what he wishes he had learned earlier, Hovnanian talks about not thinking too highly of yourself. You are not the author of a master plan, he says, and God handles that far better. He prays daily for the people he works with.

He tells of a colleague who led a global infrastructure change at GE twenty years ago; the relationship between corporate and regional was awful, and Hovnanian was unhappy with the situation. He prayed, seeked hard to see the man's point of view, and then nominated him for an award. The man thanked him, and the two worked well and became friends. Another time, he told his weekly men's breakfast group that a work conflict was going so badly that one of them might have to leave the company. He asked them to pray. "The next day, as smooth as silk."

He laughs at how often he still tries to do it himself, preparing minutes meticulously and hoping it works out, then finding it does not and praying afterward.

What to Do This Week

• Put your work shoes on. Go to where the work happens and ask what frustrates people before you propose a solution.

• Ask whether it needs fixing. Before adopting a tool, ask whether it solves a real problem or only sells the idea of progress.

• Pray for the person you struggle with. Then look for a way to honor them.

• Pass knowledge forward. Compress what you have learned and give it to someone younger.

• Tell the honest story. Share a failure with someone who only sees your success.

Hovnanian does not measure success by installed technology. He measures it by the WhatsApp chats with teams he has not worked with in over fifteen years, and by the special events he is still invited to and attends from former colleagues. Technology will keep accelerating, he says, but our relationships with one another are still what matter most.