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Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric from 1981 to 2001. Under his leadership the GE stock went up by 4,000 per cent, making it the most valuable company in the world. Fortune named him the ‘Manager of the Century’ in 1999

Suzy Welch is a former editor of Harvard Business Review. She is also the co-author of Jack Welch’s latest book Winning

You can e-mail Jack and Suzy Welch questions at winning@nytimes.com

(Please include your name, occupation, city and country)

As an ambitious 22-year-old readying to enter the corporate world, how can I quickly distinguish myself as a winner?
Dain Zaitz, Corvallis, Ore.

First of all, forget some of the most basic habits you learned in school. Once you are in the real world – and it doesn't make any difference whether you are 22 or 62, starting your first job or your fifth – the way to look great and get ahead is to over-deliver.

Look, for years, you've been taught the virtues of meeting specific expectations. And you've been trained that it's an A-plus performance to fully answer every question the teacher asks.

Those days are over. To get an A-plus in business, you have to expand the organisation's expectations of you and then exceed them, and you have to fully answer every question the teacher asks, plus a slew of questions he or she didn't even think of.

Your goal, in other words, should be to make your bosses smarter, your team more effective, and the whole company more competitive because of your energy, creativity and insights. And you thought school was hard! But don't panic. Just get in there and start thinking big. If your boss asks you for a report on the outlook for one of your company's produ-cts over the next year, you can be sure she already has a solid sense of the answer. So go beyond being the grunt assigned to confirm her hunch.

Do extra research, legwork and data-crunching to give her something that really expands her thinking. Produce an analysis of how the entire industry might play out over the next three years. It could answer vital questions like: What new companies and products might emerge? What technologies could change the game? Could someone, perhaps your own company, move production to China? In other words, give your boss something that shocks and awes her, something new and interesting that she can report to her bosses. In time, those ideas will move the company forward and you upward. But be careful. Because people who strive to over-deliver can quickly self-destruct if their big, wonderful, exciting suggestions are seen by others as unfettered braggadocio or not-so-subtle ladder scaling – or both.

That's right, personal ambition can backfire. Now, we're not saying to curb your ambition. In fact, you should have tons of it. But the minute you wear career lust on your sleeve, you run the risk of alienating people, in particular your peers.

They will soon come to doubt the motives of your hard work. They will see any comments you make about, say, how the team could operate better, as political jockeying. And they will eventually see you as a striver, and in the long run, that's a label that all the A-plus performing in the world can't overcome. So by all means, over-deliver. But keep your desire to distinguish yourself as a winner to yourself. You'll become one faster.

Revenue growth is at the top of my to-do list. What should I look for in hiring great sales professionals?
John Cioffi, Westfield, N.J.

Good news. You're halfway there. You realise that great salespeople are different from you, us and just about everyone. In fact, they're a breed apart.

Which is not to say that salespeople shouldn't have the qualities you look for in every hire: integrity, intelligence, positive energy, decisiveness and the ability to execute. It's just that they need other qualities, too – four, to be exact.

The first is enormous empathy. Great salespeople feel for their customers. They understand their needs and pressures; they get the challenges of their business. They see every deal through the customer's eyes. Yes, they represent the company, and yes, they want to make it profitable. But they are geniuses at balancing the interests of the company and the interests of the customer so that even at the end of difficult negotiations, both sides would describe the process as more than fair.

Not surprisingly, then, the second quality of great salespeople is trustworthiness. Their word is good; their handshake means something. They see every sale as part of a long-term relationship, and customers usually respond in kind.

Third, great salespeople have a powerful mixture of drive, courage and self-confidence. Cold calls are brutal. No one likes making them. But the best salespeople want to grow the business so badly that they dive into them relentlessly, day after day, and they have the inner strength not to take the inevitable rejections personally. They just take a deep breath and move on.

Finally, the best salespeople hate the 'postman model' of doing business. No offense to letter carriers! It's their job to deliver mail along a set route every day. And great salespeople certainly do a version of that too, selling current products to current customers.

But they can't help themselves – they also love to go off-road in search of product and customer opportunities. The best salespeople, for instance, think it's part of their job to regularly bring ideas home from the reaches, saying things like, "You know, if we could make XYZ, we could capture a whole new market out there."

In that way, then, the best salespeople are just like you. Revenue growth is at the top of their to-do list. Unlike you, they can make it the only thing on their list, since they aren't the boss and therefore don't have to be distracted with all kinds of other organisational matters. And that's what makes great salespeople so special.

I was recently hired as a manager at a family-owned company. My boss, the vice president of marketing, is the CEO's wife. She never went to college and has no experience in marketing, yet micromanages everyone, including those of us with MBAs. She fires anyone who disagrees with her, with her husband's full support. I've just learned that several talented people have quit because of her. Short of quitting, how do I handle nepotism gone awry?
Name withheld, Austin, Texas

Not to be difficult here, but where the heck were you during the hiring process for this job? We ask because it seems a little late for you to be discovering the kind of information that should be part of everyone's due diligence when considering employment at a family-owned company. Information like: "How many cousins want my next promotion?" or "Is it fatal – or merely dangerous – to disagree with the CEO's next of kin?" Now, we're not implying that people should avoid working in family-owned companies. These organisations, which make up a significant part of the economy, offer some of the best jobs in business.

But when you decide to work at a family-owned company, you have to realise you are accepting a special deal. And every deal has trade-offs. With this one, the upside is real. Family-owned companies give you a level of collegiality and informality rarely found in corporate environments, with cultures that are personal and warm. Employees can come to feel like family members, not numbers, and mana-gers (like you, for instance) often have direct access to the shareholders and decision-makers. You can really feel like you're in the game.

The downside is real too, as you are discovering. Because when you join a family-owned business, especially a small or medium-sized one, you often give up the adjudication process, for lack of a better term. That's the process that ‘enforces’ fairness at professionally run organisations.

We're not saying that public companies don't have their share of arbitrary or bullying bosses, or that they are devoid of favouritism. But the checks and balances at most public companies, such as employee-satisfaction surveys and the ‘higher authority’ of human resources departments, do go a long way in giving employees a sense that there is a way for them to be heard during conflicts.

The only way to handle the absence of adjudication at family companies is to be prepared. Even if things are going well, employees should always have an exit strategy. But what about your case? You don't seem to have a contract, and you say you don't want to quit. That means your only choice is, well, to adjust. You have to figure out the best way to work with the CEO's wife. Forget her educational credentials, or lack thereof. She's still your boss. So slow down your desire to make changes or speak out, and give her a chance to get to know you – and to trust you.

Yes, proper due diligence during the hiring process might have raised red flags, and perhaps you could have avoided the mess you're in. But it's too late for that now. The nepotism you're encountering is part of the family-owned deal. Enjoy its benefits while they last.

All this talk about winning makes me wonder: Is there any place for losers in this world? Only a small percentage of people succeed. What should all the non-winners do, just kill themselves?
S. Gopal, Bangalore, India

What a question – it has to mean you see winning in purely economic terms. That's just not how it has to be. We think about winning another way – as setting personal goals and achieving them, and (just as important) enjoying the experience on the way.

Winning has nothing – or everything – to do with your job. Yes, you can win as a corporate executive, but you can win just as meaningfully as a carpenter, math teacher or singer in a wedding band. You can win raising a family, caring for your parents or being a good friend as long as those are the dreams you picked for yourself.

One of the biggest winners we know is a person whom, by your economic definition, would probably not qualify at all. James O'Connell graduated from Harvard Medical School. But instead of pursuing a prestigious and lucrative career, he has spent the past 22 years driving a van around Boston practically every night, delivering medical care to the homeless.

He lives simply; money doesn't matter to him. And yet O'Connell's life is full of joy, and he is loved by everyone lucky enough to know him, from street people to senators. Look, winning and losing can't be quantified. They are states of mind, and losing only happens when you give up. Seen that way, then, the world can be filled with winners, and there is room for them all.