This article argues that a big new managerial challenge is to lower transaction costs and that the way to do this is to make trust scalable. It's not an argument you hear every day. In fact, it may surprise people. Most of us think that IT has lowered transaction costs. But the authors present evidence that our obsession with lowering production costs has led to an increase in transaction costs and that these costs are putting a "fundamental brake on innovation, both within companies and among them."