"Never make someone a priority for whom  you're just an option."

I've read innumerable variations of this line (including a remarkable number of grammatical and spelling variations) on countless online profiles - whether it's cheap philosophy or painfully won wisdom I know not. The line occurred to me in a different context at a lunch this week at which the Overseas Press Club, a convivium of American foreign correspondents, handed out fellowships to a dozen younglings who wish to follow in their journalistic footsteps. Always these days, media gatherings are grim, sardonic affairs, with about as much optimism as I have capital gains. I fell into a conversation with a veteran of the New York Times (and not just its print pages, but its website, which is an extraordinary resource), now working elsewhere, about the problem of paid content - the problem, rather, of unpaid content. We agreed that he's a fool who thinks monetizing eyeballs is a sustainable business. (A fool whose name is Legion, unfortunately.) It can't go on and everyone knows it. Even in good times, when they return, there won't be enough advertising money to support giveaway journalism.

Trouble is-and it was trouble when Sock Puppet ruled the Web-that in a digital world one company's revenue is another's loss leader: a priority, competing with an option. In an unintended consequence of convergence, on the digital High Street Prada (which makes money selling shoes) is just one storefront away from the pawnshop (which practically gives the shoes away because it makes money on the loans it makes), whereas in the real world the two are in vastly different parts of town. Thus I work for a consulting firm that publishes a magazine that makes more money for us from the leads it generates than from its advertising and circulation revenue; but the company I used to work for publishes a magazine that's supposed to be  highly profitable in its own right.

Over the years, I've developed a Tennessee Williams theory of capitalism, which holds that a business that depends on the kindness of strangers is in trouble, or will be one day. In that sense, what's becoming obviously true for newspapers is just as inevitably so for anyone else, whether they're electronics retailers or law firms or dental hygienists: You've got to find clientele who are willing to pay you for your pains, or the pain will become yours.

My luncheon colleague and I didn't solve this for his alma mater. But we're Facebook friends now.

Thomas A. Stewart is the Chief Marketing and Knowledge Officer of Booz & Company. Formerly the Editor and Managing Director of Harvard Business Review, he is the author of Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations and The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the 21st-Century Organization.

Have you ever noticed that the only business people who talk about level playing fields are those on the downside of a field that is tilted?  The whole point of business is to find  high ground, preferably surrounded by briars, moats, walls, and other barriers to entry. Therein lie profits; outside be monsters.

I was thinking about that last week, while giving a talk to a group of executives from the outsourcing industries - IT service providers, HR benefits managers, and others who are either buyers or sellers of business services. The speech was titled "Globalization - Are We There Yet?" The short answer is "No," of course. Globalization has been reshaping competition for more than a quarter-century, at least since Theodore Levitt described "The Globalization of Markets" in HBR in 1983; but it will be a long time before we can say we're mostly there, or even know what "there" will look like.

In this time, globalization has upended as many playing fields as it has leveled. Like the classic tilting labyrinth children's game,  it requires players to adjust quickly to a continuously changing environment. That's because globalization is inherently reciprocal. The globalizing markets Levitt wrote about mean that you can find customers anywhere in the world. But the reciprocal is also true: Customers can search for sellers anywhere in the world, and play them off against each other. Similarly, the globalization of production means that companies can make or source anything anywhere, driving down their costs; but it also means that rivals can come from anywhere to compete with them - perhaps on cost, perhaps on some other basis.

Right now, desperate governments, often at the behest of desperate companies and their workers, are trying to tilt the playing field in a direction that favors home industries. The protectionist genie is very much back out of the bottle: The first question I was asked by my outsourcing audience was about protectionism; those of you who work in the EU are watching the community act like partners in a troubled marriage, wondering who will get which furniture, pictures, and children. We all know that's stupid in the long run: Who beggars his neighbor most beggars himself.

Still, the need for massive government stimulus is self-evident and governments put their citizens before all others: That's their job description. The trick is to design stimuli that define the future as much as they defend the past. Globalization guarantees that politically won competitive advantage will be evanescent. A business's right to win can ultimately be guaranteed only by its own capabilities.

Thomas A. Stewart is the Chief Marketing and Knowledge Officer of Booz & Company. Formerly the Editor and Managing Director of Harvard Business Review, he is the author of Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations and The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the 21st-Century Organization.

Friday General Electric's stock hit  $6.66 - the number of the Beast. You don't have to be religious to find that scary. We were joking, grimly, around the office that we should make an intra-departmental bonus pool by buying blue chip stocks - perhaps Bank of America ($3.59), Citigroup ($1.03), DuPont ($5.34), Alcoa ($5.22), Ford ($1.70), Newscorp ($5.31) - counting GE, about $30 for a one-share basket, about $1000 if we bought a basket for everyone in the department. That would be less than the cost of  taking the team to dinner. My own opinion, even if a couple of those companies went to zero (I don't have to tell you which), the basket is likely to be worth a more a year from now - so if we paid ourselves the bonus, we could go to a better restaurant and order a few bottles of a modest, good value claret.

To earn the bonus, though, we'd have to do something I'm not sure we know how to do. "Job Losses Hint at Vast Remaking of Economy" said the lead headline in Saturday's New York Times (which closed at $4.07). The reporters, Peter S. Goodman and Jack Healey, wrote "In key industries - manufacturing, financial services and retail - layoffs have accelerated so quickly in recent months as to suggest that many companies are abandoning whole areas of business." Certainly that squares with the advice my Booz & Company colleagues have given in what I believe is the single best overview  - yes, I am biased, but I have also read all the others - of the mindset big companies should have as they rethink their strategy: "Don't wait. Reduce your breakeven now - by a lot....

Lowering your breakeven to this degree means getting rid of significantly more cost than is needed to offset the coming falloff in demand. It also means extracting a full measure of the potential benefit from simplifying your business." Cutting's not enough, though: "Major changes may now be possible whereas before you may only have thought incrementally. This downturn is a once-in-a-century opportunity to redefine your competitive position." It's one thing to run lean. The big, bonus-winning challenge is to reinvent.

Big companies have a hard time making changes that fundamentally redefine themselves or their industries. It's no accident that new industries have historically tended to be developed by immigrants or others who are free to move into them because they are have little access to jobs in established companies.

So let's, if we can, take off our big-company-logo baseball cap and stop watering our beer with our tears and rewrite that headline. Go back a few years, and we might have read "Job Gains in Silicon Valley Hint at Vast Remaking of Economy / An ‘Information Age'? / Home prices soar in town of neo-millionaires." Go back a century and a half, and perhaps we might have read: "Rise of Midlands Hints as Vast Remaking of Economy / An ‘Industrial Revolution'? / The new man has vast girth, vast fortune, no manners."

Now spin the dial forward. Imagine that we harness the sun, wind, and tides as we know how to do, build the smart grids that we know how to make, build sustainable new cities (like Masdar) and retrofit old ones, so that energy is plentiful and ubiquitous, inexpensive and green. Not the energy "too cheap to meter" that Lewis L Strauss notoriously prophesied, but energy so available and harmless that it is a platform, not a constraint: You could use it for anything, build anything on it you wished, rather like the vast underpopulated plains of the 19th-century American West.

Our imaginary headline reads: "Entrepreneurship Rise Hints at Vast Remaking of Economy." Now write the rest of the story. And sell me those stocks.

Thomas A. Stewart is the Chief Marketing and Knowledge Officer of Booz & Company. Formerly the Editor and Managing Director of Harvard Business Review, he is the author of Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations and The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the 21st-Century Organization.

For three days at the end of May — the 24th through the 26th — scores of world business leaders gathered in Copenhagen to discuss ideas and options leading up to the UN climate conference to be held in the same city in November, when a treaty to supplant and extend the Kyoto accords with the promulgated for ratification by the nations of the world, a consummation devoutly to be wished.