To get something done, stay focused

How important is focus when it comes to facing challenging issues?

In the Pixar animated movie “Up,” there’s a character named “Dug.” Dug is a dog who wears a special collar that translates what he’s thinking into words. At regular intervals during the movie, we hear Dug yell “Squirrel!” and then he stops whatever he was doing and goes in search of the squirrel. Dug, like many of us, is easily distracted.

While Dug’s distractions in the movie are good for a laugh – he is, after all, a lovable dog – they are also a good reminder of the importance of staying focused if we want to have any hope of accomplishing what it is we believe we are setting out to accomplish.

It is indeed challenging to stay focused when there are many issues facing us at the same time. Among these issues are: inflation, crime and violence, hunger and homelessness, the economy, affordable health care, illegal immigration, drug addiction, international terrorism, domestic terrorism, racism, unemployment, gun violence, the quality of education, climate change…and these are just the top items of concern to Americans according to the Pew Research Center and Gallup.

One can easily spend the day reading up on each of these issues from any number of sources and then spend the next day mapping out how to learn or engage more on the issues. That each of us can easily list items not included on the Pew or Gallup lists is a stark reminder of the magnitude of concerns that greet us every day.

It's also a reminder of just how easy it is to lose focus of whatever challenge we happen to be facing at any moment. An intense job search, for example, easily can turn into a deep dive online into some issue or other as a result of researching a potential employer. The next thing you know an hour or two or a day has been lost. It’s also very possible to lose focus when taking a break to make a sandwich and next thing you know you’re meal planning for the next week.

Yes, we can do many things, but I’m not convinced we can do them all at once if we want to do them well. Staying focused is critical if we want to get things done.

The same is true when we find ourselves wrestling with a tough ethical challenge at home or at work. If, for example, we’re being asked to do something that we know crosses ethical lines, it’s easy to lose focus of exactly what it is that concerns us and get caught up in all sorts of tangential worries that will not help us decide how best to proceed. Making sure we gather facts to make a sound decision is important. But gathering facts that have little to do with the challenge facing us can distract us from getting anything done. Perhaps most importantly we should focus on prioritizing which challenges are most important to tackle first.

Staying focused when facing tough challenges is the right thing to do, no matter how many squirrels cross our path.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

What does customer owe a salesperson?

Is it wrong not to notify someone when you won't be purchasing a product or a service? 

Two questions arose from readers this week that are variations of the question about how obligated we should feel when dealing with someone wanting to sell you a product or service.

The first is from a reader we're calling Dinah who has been shopping for a new dining room table and chairs. At one furniture store she visited, a salesperson spent a good deal of time with Dinah showing her tables and chairs, what finishes were available, and then quoting Dinah a price, which the salesperson printed out with details so Dinah could take the materials home and consider the purchase. After arriving home, Dinah called the salesperson to ask her for the dimensions of the table, which weren't on the printed materials. Throughout the salesperson was patient and responsive, according to Dinah.

A few days after her visit, Dinah decided that the dining room set was not exactly what she wanted so she wasn't going to go forward with the purchase. She wondered, however, if she owed it to the salesperson to call her to let her know and to thank her for her time.

The second question is from a reader we're calling Winnie. Winnie is in the market to buy replacement windows for her home. She made several calls with installers so they could come to her house, take measurements, and give her an estimate for the cost. Two of the three prospective installers showed up on time, took the information they needed for an estimate, and left. The third person was supposed to arrive between 11 and 11:30 a.m., but never showed up. By 6 p.m., Winnie had heard nothing from the third person – no sorry for missing the appointment, no attempt to reschedule, no nothing.

Winnie wondered if she should call the person who didn't show up to find out what went wrong.

In each case, there is no obligation for Dinah or Winnie to call the salesperson or vendor.

With the dining room set salesperson, Dinah had not committed to the sale and the salesperson was well aware that a sale isn't a sale until the deal is closed. If Dinah wanted to call the salesperson to thank her for her time and to let her know she wouldn't be making the purchase, that would be a nice gesture. A customer isn't obligated to tell someone when they don't plan to buy something. Doing something nice when there's no obligation to do so can be a good thing.

With the no-show window person, Winnie has absolutely no reason to call them. The window person should have called Winnie to let her know they wouldn't be keeping the appointment. If they should ever call or text, Winnie would be wise to consider that experience in weighing who to use to install her windows.

Providing good service and showing up when promised should not only be bare minimum requirements for product or service people, they are the right thing to do.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Are you responsible for checking your AI work?

If you use artificial intelligence (AI) to assist you in your professional work, how much responsibility do you have to check to make sure that whatever AI provides is accurate?

I am not an AI basher. There are moments when AI can be useful. In my line of work, some find it useful to correct grammar and usage, help with generating broad ideas, assist with a translation of a foreign phrase, or any number of other items. But by itself, AI – whether it is ChatGPT, X’s Grok or any number of other generative AI tools – is yet to be trusted to replace an actual human being without that human being double-checking all the work.

AI-generated documents are notorious for “hallucinating” or making stuff up. AI output is often rife with errors that might include made-up facts or references to sources that simply don’t exist. Sometimes it even includes links to those nonexistent sources, which go to nonexistent pages.

As an exercise, I asked ChatGPT to write my biography. Because I’ve been writing this column for the past 27 years, have written for other publications, made some television appearances, written books, appear in the directories or on the websites of the schools where I have taught, and have a short Wikipedia profile, there is plenty of information about me available on the internet. Most of what I’ve seen has correct information. There is plenty of data from which ChatGPT can draw.

Most of what ChatGPT came up with was correct, but some was not. Only someone who knows everything about me -- my work and my family -- would be able to discern what’s correct.

It listed my wife’s name as Lynne, which was a surprise to both me and my wife, Nancy. It mentioned my two daughters-in-law, Megan and Monica, who to the best of my knowledge don’t exist. While I do have four grandchildren, their names are not, as ChatGPT insists, David, Rose, Jonah and Mae. My first great-grandchild is not Eleanor Mae, although that is a lovely name. I also did not live with Lynne, whomever she may be, in New York City for a couple of years in the early 1980s. ChatGPT also provided me with a nephew named Joshua, also nonexistent.

ChatGPT also pegged me as the former managing editor of the Harvard Business Review, a publication I admire but have never written for, let alone edited. It listed many of the books I’ve written correctly but included others I didn’t, such as "Writing to Be Understood," a fact that would come as a surprise to Anne Janzer, who actually wrote that book. It also had me listed as the inaugural fellow in residence at the Center for the Study of Ethics at Utah Valley University. I’ve visited Utah, but never Orem where that university is located and never held that fellowship, if it exists (although if Utah Valley makes an offer, I’ll consider it). ChatGPT also thinks I’m a Fulbright Specialist. I’m not.

The right thing when using AI is to remember that it is a tool that is not foolproof without a human check. Sometimes it gets things right. Often it doesn’t. Assuming that you can use it to do your work for you – whether you’re a teacher, student, researcher, bureaucrat, job seeker or anybody else – is wrong if you expect your work to accurately reflect you and your abilities. I’m confident even Lynne would agree, if she existed.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

When friends don’t listen, should we dump them?

Should you dump friends who don’t seem to care as much about you as you care about them?

A reader we’re calling Amity indicates that she has many close friends, some of whom she’s had for years. Even when friends move away, Amity makes a point to stay in touch with about a half dozen of her friends once a week with at least a text and often with a longer phone conversation. Amity writes that she regularly asks about her friends’ lives.

Recently, however, Amity has noticed that few of her friends ask about her, or even when they do, the conversation almost always turns back to talk of whatever the friend happens to be going through at that moment. Amity admits that she isn’t typically as forthcoming about her personal life as her friends are, but she does like to feel as if her friends care as much about her as she does about them.

The perception that the balance of concern might be off hit Amity particular after she confided in a few friends about a health scare she had experienced. While she is fine now, she was taken aback that whenever she brought up her illness with friends, the focus of the conversation generally shifted from her to whatever her friends happened to be going through at the moment. Some friends did and continue to ask her how she is at the beginning of a conversation, but here too she feels like they don’t focus as much on her as she would have on them.

Amity is concerned that her friends don’t care about her or that perhaps she has the wrong friends. Isn’t it wrong, she wonders, for them not to spend as much time talking about me as I do talking about them?

Since I don’t know Amity’s friends, I can’t speak to their appropriateness as friends. But I suspect that many of them are just as good a friend to Amity as they ever were. What’s likely changed, however, are Amity’s needs and her desire to break from the pattern of behavior she established with her friends long ago.

While true friends should indeed care about one another, there is no spreadsheet on which to tally who spends the most time caring about the other. Talking about someone in a conversation is just one way to indicate concern.

By Amity’s own admission, she hasn’t been as forthcoming about her personal life as her friends have been. While she may want to be more forthcoming now, her friends may not know this and instead default to the pattern they’ve established over the years.

It may feel a bit uncomfortable and out of character, but if Amity needs more listening time from her friends, the right thing is for her to tell them that. Granted, some friends are so in sync with one another that they know when a friend needs something, but many are not gifted at reading minds, particularly if the conversation is via spare and relatively emotionless text messages.

If some of her friends don’t respond to her request, then Amity may indeed want to address whether it’s time to let a friendship wane. But perhaps giving them a chance to step up and listen is something a true friend might do.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

When shouldn’t a friend honor a request for confidence?

Is it wrong to ignore a friend’s request to keep a confidence if you believe doing so might result in that friend being in danger?

For the past several years, a reader we’re calling Tom has noticed that an elderly friend who lives several states away has been having trouble remembering things. The friend will often call several times a day, forgetting that he had called earlier and often not remembering why he called.

Tom has been concerned but he has rested a bit easier knowing that his friend has family living nearby, a couple of whom seem to check in with him regularly. Occasionally, one family member in particular will give Tom a call to let him know how his friend is doing.

Recently, however, Tom got several calls within a couple of hours from his friend who seemed to be in a more agitated state than usual. The friend told Tom that he was having trouble logging into his email and that he was unable to reach anyone in his family who lived nearby. When Tom pressed his friend on how long it had been since he spoke with family members, his friend was unsure. The friend was convinced, however, that the family members had stopped talking to him or taking his calls and he suspected that they cut off his email as well.

Tom was unsure what to do. This was not the first time his friend seemed confused and forgetful. But this time the friend specifically asked Tom not to call his family since he was convinced they were cutting him off.

While Tom was pretty sure his friend’s family was not cutting him off and that there was a logical explanation, he wrestled with whether he should honor his friend’s request to not call his family or if he should go ahead and do so to ask them if all was OK.

If Tom planned to call the friend’s family in spite of his requests not to, the right thing would be to tell his friend that he was planning to do so. He could explain that he was concerned and was not willing to risk something going truly wrong at his friend’s house without his family knowing. Or if Tom did not believe his friend was at risk, he could do what he typically did in such cases and wait a few hours and then check back in with his friend.

Tom ultimately chose to do the latter and within an hour his friend called him back to tell him that the family member who usually checked in on him had just called to let him know that she’d been tied up tending to a friend who had a medical emergency. All was fine, Tom’s friend told him, and then he began to regale him with old stories from their youth as if nothing was wrong.

Tom honored his friend’s request not to get in touch with his family and all turned out OK-ish, but in cases such as this, Tom would do well to enlist the help of those in closer proximity to his friend if he believes his friend is in danger. Even if the friend is unlikely to remember Tom telling him he planned to call his family, Tom would still be doing the right thing by letting his friend know his intentions.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.