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.