Q: What criteria should be used to determine if you have been with the same company too long? Jason Morrow, Salt Lake City

A: Your question reminds us of a friend of ours, an investment manager at a highly regarded company in the Midwest, who drove to work one morning, parked his car in the usual spot and then found he simply could not bring himself to get out.

“I guess I stayed on the farm one day too long,” he joked later. When we asked him what went wrong, he answered, “It wasn’t one thing. It was everything.” No wonder he drove home and called in his resignation.

Obviously, most people don’t decide they’ve overstayed at their companies in such a dramatic fashion. Usually, angst about work creeps in, and then builds until it consumes you. And that can happen early or late in a career.

Gone are the days when, after graduation, you took the best available job and stayed for as many years as you possibly could stand, frustration be damned. These days, it is not unusual to hear of perfectly legitimate careers built on multiple job stints.

So, to your question, how can you tell when it’s time to move on? We wouldn’t set out specific criteria as much as offer four questions to help sort out an answer.

The first is so simple it almost goes without saying, but the fact that a lot of people don’t confront it, including our friend who ended up stuck in his car—a Harvard MBA, by the way—suggests we go ahead and put it out there.

Look, do you want to go to work every morning?

This is not a matter to be overthought. Does the prospect of going in each day excite you or fill you with dread? Does the work feel interesting and meaningful or are you just going through motions to pull a paycheck? Are you still learning and growing?

We know of a woman who worked in consulting for seven years. She loved her firm and had originally planned a career with it, but suddenly started noticing that she wished every weekend was five days long. “Basically, I felt like we were putting together massive books in order to make recommendations to people who knew more than we did,” she said. “Every day at the office, I felt a little bit more of a hypocrite.” She now happily works on the “frontlines,” to use her phrase, in the marketing department of a retail company.

Second, do you enjoy spending time with your coworkers or do they generally bug the living daylights out of you?

We’re not saying you should only stay in your company if you want to barbecue with your team every weekend, but if you don’t sincerely enjoy and respect the people you spend 10 hours a day with, you can be sure you will eventually decide to leave your organization. Why not make the break sooner rather than later, and start cultivating relationships in a company where you might actually plant roots?

Third, does your company help you fulfill your personal mission?

Essentially, this question asks whether your company jibes with your life’s goals and values. Does it require you, for instance, to travel more than you’d like, given your chosen work-life balance? Does it offer enough upward mobility, given your level of ambition? There is no right or wrong answer to questions such as these, only a sense of whether you are investing your time in the right or wrong company for you.

Fourth, and finally, can you picture yourself in your company in a year?

We use that time frame because that’s how long it usually takes to find a new, better job once you decide to move on. So peer, as best you can, into the future, and predict where you’ll be in the organization, what work you’ll be doing, whom you will be managing and who will be managing you. If that scenario strikes you with anything short of excitement, then your runway is too short. Or put another way, you’re just about to stay too long.

To be clear: we’re not suggesting people quit at the first inkling of discontent. No matter where you work, at some point you will have to endure difficult times, and even a deadly dull assignment, to survive a crisis or move up.

But it makes little sense to stay and stay in a company because of inertia. Unlock your door and get out.  

****

Jack and Suzy Welch are the authors of the international bestseller Winning (Collins). Their latest book is Winning: The Answers: Confronting 74 of the Toughest Questions in Business Today (Collins). They are eager to hear about your career dilemmas and challenges at work and look forward to answering your questions in future columns. You can e-mail them questions at winning@nytimes.com. Please include your name, occupation, city and country.

The calling

Oscar Sańez wears a pin of the Philippine flag on his business suit and carries a photo of his role model Jose Rizal in his wallet—close to wearing his patriotism on his sleeve.

Winning: Knowing when you’ve stayed too long

Q: What criteria should be used to determine if you have been with the same company too long? Jason Morrow, Salt Lake City                 

A: Your question reminds us of a friend of ours, an investment manager at a highly regarded company in the Midwest, who drove to work one morning, parked his car in the usual spot and then found he simply could not bring himself to get out.

Smooth sailing

IN today’s global commerce, which requires seamless logistics solutions, a country’s geographical setting is indeed a determining factor in trade.

Advertising under siege

AGREEING with Mcluhan, marketing strategists Al and Laura Ries arrived at a conclusion that’s less than comforting to advertising people: if advertising is an art, it belongs in a museum, not in the marketing department (The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR, Harper-Collins).

When it comes to quality, consumer electronics giant Sony Corp. scores highly among buyers

CONSUMERS the world over are now shifting to products of high caliber—and Sony, among other brands, is certainly their first choice.

He’s no Paris

There are moments for many parents when they look at their children and see themselves. It happened to Bill Marriott a few weeks ago during breakfast in Tokyo.

Winning: When a raw deal isn’t one

Q: What is wrong with the Yankees? How could they stick a manager as great as Joe Torre with such a raw deal? Stephen MacMillan, Boston                 

A: Since we’re going to take issue with your perspective in a few paragraphs, allow us to begin this column with our points of agreement.

Finding the peace within all of us

Brute force can never subdue the basic human desire for freedom. The thousands of people who marched in the cities of Eastern Europe in recent decades, the unwavering determination of the people in my homeland of Tibet and the recent demonstrations in Burma are powerful reminders of this truth.

Madness, death and solitude

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

Huffing&puffing

New Zealand-born Australian tobacco executive Jeremy Flint, general manager of British American Tobacco (BAT) Philippines has quit smoking and has abstained from the habit the past five months or so.

Place your bets on the future you want

Which firms will gain and which will lose as governments and businesses begin to take climate change seriously? Corporate balance sheets provide a few clues: As greenhouse gas emissions get costlier, the relative value of such assets as natural gas, which produces less carbon dioxide than coal when burned, will increase.

Five Questions

Restoring the fortunes of a company that has fallen on hard times often calls for bold moves, says Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and author of Confidence: How Winning & Losing Streaks Begin and End (Crown Business, 2004).

Winning: Boardroom benchwarmers

Q:  I sit on a board with two members who, for the past year, have said and done very little. Regardless, both were just reelected unanimously with the support of the nominating committee. What’s your take? Name withheld, New York 

A: So, two seat-warmers on your board were just reelected unanimously, you say? Doesn’t that mean you voted for them, too? If so, don’t worry. You’re definitely not the only board member in history to endure an ineffective or otherwise dysfunctional fellow director.

Cyber Ed, Thai Style

The advent of the Internet has brought many wonders to people’s lives. One of them is education. Through the Internet, educators have been able to widen their reach to cover far-flung places that used to have limited access to learning tools.

Moral? Revolution?

SOMETIMES we must listen to our political leaders even if they give us the feeling that they are just leading us by the nose. We may even take them seriously, if only because we have no choice: we elected them. But first we must unravel the meaning of their words when they seem to speak earnestly and dramatically. At this time, the words are Moral Revolution.

After Wolfowitz

WASHINGTON—If one thing has become clear since Robert Zoellick became World Bank president three months ago, it’s that he isn’t Paul Wolfowitz.

Commentary: Will the ‘bottom billion’ ever catch up?

The World Bank’s new president, Robert Zoellick, passed a major milestone: his first time leading the bank’s annual meetings. As the world’s finance and development ministers descended on Washington last week, Zoellick established himself firmly at the head of the most important agency designed to ensure that globalization does not leave people behind, mired in desperate poverty. But he faces a planet that has changed far more rapidly than his institution has.

What makes change happen?

You have been charged with implementing a significant new initiative. Perhaps your company has defined a new competitive strategy and you need to align your group behind it. Or maybe you’ve identified stubborn problems in your unit that need solving.

If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu

When the companies of the United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP)—businesses including GE, Alcoa, DuPont and PG&E—announced their call for federal standards on greenhouse gas emissions in January 2007, The Wall Street Journal castigated these “jolly green giants” for acting in their own self-interest in promoting a regulatory program “designed to financially reward companies that reduce CO2 emissions, and punish those that don’t.”