Nicolas Rodriguez, Lima, Peru

A When it comes to transparency, leaders don't need to pull off a balancing act as much as they need to stick to four rules.

Two of these rules are easy.

One should be easy but constantly gets screwed up. And the fourth is just plain hard. No picking and choosing, though. In today's "unforgiving" environment, to use your apt term, you need to do them all.

The first rule: When it comes to communicating about financial information with the external world of investors, analysts and the media, public companies just can't be transparent enough. Every piece of disclosed data increases the market's insight and, ultimately, builds trust. That dynamic is a no-brainer. Despite the overheated carping of shareholder activists, most companies get it right.

The second rule: When it comes to gaining marketplace advantage, you just can't be secretive enough. There's a breakthrough product in the works, for instance, or a bold acquisition under consideration.

Managers should fight to keep such information confidential, otherwise there could be no strategic surprise. That's one of the great, and perfectly legitimate, weapons of business 'warfare'.

The third rule (where things too often go awry): Communicating with employees about 'oh god no!' kind of changes, such as plant closings or layoffs. Obviously, companies should never let employees be the last to know the details of such life-altering events. Indeed, they should be the first . . . that's the rule.

But somehow, the typical scenario plays out like this: A company posts disappointing results and then, to mollify analysts, quickly announces job cuts with big, precise-sounding numbers. The news not only takes employees by surprise, it usually leaves them twisting in the wind for weeks (or even months) before managers "gure out exactly what they're going to do and to whom. That is just awful leadership.

The same thing happens with mergers, especially those that come with pronouncements about massive cost savings from the combination. While executives sit around pondering every conceivable option, Joe in San Jose, California, and Mary in Baltimore are dying inside. That condition is not exactly conducive to, say, innovation, teamwork, or customer service, not to mention rapid productivity gains.

The fourth rule is just plain hard so it gets broken all the time. The reason: It requires people to do something unnatural, which is to go very public at the time they most want to hide in a cave . . . during a crisis.

You've seen it. Bad news about your company hits the paper and suddenly grim executives are huddled in conference rooms, only to emerge with evasive statements that imply the problem is small and fully contained. What a pointless exercise.

Just about every business crisis involves more people, more money and more damage than appears at first and there are no secrets in the world.

That's why the only meaningful strategy in a crisis is full-bore openness, with all energies focused on finding and fixing what went wrong.

Now, we don't mean to oversimplify something that is an important business issue but managers needn't over-brain this one. Transparency has its time and, with just one exception, the answer is largely now.

Q What decision model can be used to launch a technology at the right moment?

Kees Moolenaar, Rotterdam, Netherlands

A You must be referring to the famous 'someone is shaking me by the collar begging me to do it and, even though I don't know every piece of market data I wish I did, my gut says it's probably OK to launch the thing at this point' model.

Admittedly not a very precise name as models go but it's the only one we know that works.

OK, we're just saying there's very little science to timing a technology launch. Of course, you have to conduct research to determine if there's a hole in the market that your product fills better than anyone else's.

But you will never know exactly how the market will respond, nor will you ever be 100% certain about the viability of your technology. And forget any discounted rate of return analyses. With a new technology, those numbers fall somewhere between guessing and wishful thinking.

Which is why your decision 'model' comes down to two factors: a positive gut feeling drawn from enough data, and a person in your organization who's wildly excited to lead the charge.

Do not bet on one or the other.

Only bet on both. And even then, understand that timing a new technology launch basically comes down to a white-knuckled leap of faith . . . or put another way, courage. And that's something no model can quantify.

Jack and Suzy Welch are the authors of the international bestseller Winning. You can email them questions at winning@nytimes. com.