Our annual survey of ideas and trends that will make an impact on business: Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi believe consumer credit should be made as safe as any other product. Paul Collier and Jean-Louis Warnholz reveal an increasingly investment-friendly climate in sub-Saharan Africa. Amy J.C. Cuddy asserts that warmth and competence are not mutually exclusive. John Sviokla predicts a surge of peer-to-peer lending in the wake of the financial crisis. Noah J. Goldstein explains the impact of social pressure on customers' behavior. Raymond Fisman urges the creation of a global forensic economics lab modeled on Interpol. Paul Saffo warns of a brain drain out of the U.S. Gurdeep Singh Pall and Rita Gunther McGrath contemplate the ramifications of immortalizing business meetings in searchable, high-quality digital video. Janine M. Benyus and Gunter A.M. Pauli illustrate the advantages of innovation copied from nature. Michael I. Norton observes that an investment of effort can lead to unduly glorifying its results. Peter Schwartz dispels the illusion that global temperatures are actually falling. Nicholas A. Christakis shows that personal influence wanes beyond three degrees of separation. Marcelo Suarez-Orozco sees the migrant millions as untapped brand emissaries to their relatives back home. Ian Bremmer and Juan Pujadas chart the growing influence of state capitalism in four industry sectors. Steve Jurvetson shares a fun way to stimulate the growth of new brain cells. Lew McCreary spotlights the interior designs of two adventurous architects who aim to counteract the degenerative effects of physical comfort. Tom Ilube explains the semantic web - a quiet revolution in technology that will radically change the internet. Alex Pentland weighs the benefits of combining two distinct kinds of social networking. Thomas H. Davenport and Bala Iyer look at the offshore outsourcing of decision making. R. Stanley Williams envisions a central nervous system for the earth.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Companies deploying dishonest tactics toward customers, suppliers, distributors, and others typically do so to increase short-term profits, and in that regard they might succeed. But the misconduct is likely to fuel social psychological processes within the organization that have the potential for ruinous fiscal outcomes, outweighing short-term gains. There are three types of consequences to organizational dishonesty: reputation degradation, (mis)matches between values of employees and the organization, and increased surveillance. These outcomes can lead to decreases in repeat business and job satisfaction--and increases in worker turnover, employee theft, and other hidden costs. These consequences will, like tumors, spread and eat progressively at the organization's health and vigor. They will also be difficult to identify through typical accounting methods and might lead to corrective efforts that overshoot the true causes of poor productivity and profitability. Without a thorough understanding of the three types of consequences, an organization could try to control one financial hemorrhage (for example, losses from employee theft) by creating another (namely, investments in increasingly expensive security systems).