The publication of Working Paper No. 1 of the GTMGO Canon, titled 'Engineering Trust: Why the AI Economy May Require a New Executive Management Discipline,' proposes a new executive management discipline called Go-To-Market Governance (GTMGO). The paper argues that as artificial intelligence transforms how organizations innovate and scale, governance has remained fragmented across independent functional areas, creating a challenge in preserving trust amid rapid change.
According to the paper, GTMGO aims to help organizations engineer governance into growth rather than applying governance after growth has occurred. It introduces foundational concepts including Governance Engineering as the scientific methodology of the discipline; the Go-To-Market Governance Officer as the executive accountable for achieving Trusted Growth; the Governance Velocity Gap™ as the organizational challenge when innovation outpaces governance; and GTMGO Thermodynamic-Friction™ as the cumulative resistance from governance evolving slower than enterprise change.
The work is informed by observations from aviation, legal practice, professional sports labor relations, entertainment, broadcasting, healthcare-adjacent governance, privacy, cybersecurity, and enterprise leadership. These observations are synthesized through management science, systems thinking, and engineering methodology to propose a unified governance discipline for AI-enabled enterprises.
Rather than restating existing legal, regulatory, or compliance frameworks, the paper proposes that recurring engineering principles exist across trusted professions and regulated industries. The GTMGO Canon is being released as a sequence of Working Papers, reflecting a belief that management disciplines evolve through disciplined inquiry and continuous refinement.
Executives, directors, governance professionals, lawyers, technologists, engineers, cybersecurity practitioners, privacy leaders, healthcare administrators, financial institutions, regulators, researchers, and academics are invited to review the Working Paper and contribute observations. Feedback will be documented through the GTMGO Research Notes process and considered for future Working Papers.
The paper asks whether, if the AI economy has transformed how organizations innovate, it is time to rethink how organizations govern innovation. More information is available at Peter Q. John's LinkedIn profile.
