Still, a smaller bonus! What should I do?

JM, Johannesburg, South Africa

A Your letter leaves out two critical pieces of information when it comes to making sense of bonuses: How did the company do this year, and, how did your department perform? If the answer to either of those questions is "worse than last year", then the reason for your 10% decrease could be right under your nose.

Another possibility could be a good old-fashioned bureaucratic screw-up.

Your old boss and your new boss might not have exchanged notes about your pay, or the human resources department may have missed a beat when you changed positions.

But there is a third possibility, one to think hard about if your company and department did well over the past year. You may have hit your targets, but your performance is a relative thing. It can be (and probably is) measured relative to what was expected of you and to the performance of other members of the team. It is possible you've done well enough to receive positive feedback, but not as well as hoped, or not as well as a number of your co-workers.

There is, of course, only one way to find out what's going on, and that is with a candid conversation with your boss. Make an appointment, and calmly ask her to explain your bonus. Your main goal with this talk is to learn. So listen more than talk, and by all means, do it soon.

A Don't ever let confusion fester. In time, it will only turn to anger.

One last point here, and it is a broader one for anyone who has got a degree while working at a company. In our experience, once you've "bettered yourself" with education at night or parttime, you're much better off moving on to another organisation.

People tend to have what we call an 'embedded reputation' at their companies. A degree never seems to change that, even if your work improves. If you want real bang for your education's buck, take your new credential elsewhere, where it stands a much better chance of making you look as good as you intended it to.

Do you believe that large corporations are riddled with office politics . . . the 'who you know, not what you know' syndrome . . . such that many people are stifled in favour of those who posture in the right way?

Peter Sharp, Essex, England Q There will always be office politics, but it's ridiculous to think that big business is "riddled" with it.

Plenty of companies all over the world, winning companies, do everything in their power to get rid of it every day. In fact, they're desperate to.

Why? Because managers with brains in their heads know that you win when the best performers . . . not the people who posture in the right way . . . get heard and get ahead. You don't think Microsoft grew into the most successful computer company in the world with a bunch of sycophantic dopes on the senior management team, do you?

Or that Procter & Gamble reinvigorated its approach to innovation because it promoted a bunch of empty-headed rear-end kissers?

These companies, and thousands like them, deliver results because they are meritocracies, where brains and sweat matter A more than who had cocktails with the boss last week.

Office politics, in our experience, is mainly just the purview of three types of employees.

The first is boss-haters.

These are the perpetually disaffected individuals in most every organisation who have a congenital disdain for authority. It's just part of their constitution. They go to work every day looking for palace intrigue, and part of that campaign is muttering away that some unworthy dunderhead got ahead because of "connections".

The second type is underperformers, who use office politics to explain away their own shortcomings. They deserved the promotion, but Mary got it because she went to school with the boss's brother, and that kind of thing.

The third type consists of the underutilised: the bored. As the old saying goes, "Idle hands are the devil's workshop".

Given the people behind office politics, it is easy to see why mainly lousy companies are affected.

Good companies work ardently to root out these types of people or to get them back on course. That doesn't mean they succeed completely, but they never stop trying.

I am 17 years old and preparing for university. I am thinking of taking Portuguese. But in your opinion, what language should I learn to succeed in the world of business?

And what fields of study hold the most potential?

Marketa Strakova, Czech Republic Q You are on to something with Portuguese, since it will give you a leg up in several markets with good potential, such as Brazil and some emerging African nations. But for our money, Chinese is the language to learn.

In the span of your career, China could become the second-largest economy in the world. Any European who can do business there with the speed and intimacy that fluency affords will be way ahead of the game.

As for what to study: if you want to be where the action is now and for the next several decades, learn everything you can about the confluence of three fields: biotechnology, information technology and nanotechnology. For the foreseeable future, the therapies, machines, devices and other products and services that these fields bring to market will revolutionise society and business.

That said, when it comes to picking an educational field and ultimately a career, absolutely nothing beats pursuing the path that truly fascinates your mind, engages your energy and touches your soul.

Whatever you do, do what turns your crank.

Otherwise your job will always just be work . . . and how dreary is that?

A Jack and Suzy Welch are the authors of the international best-seller Winning. You can email them questions at Winning@nytimes. com