A year ago, at the end of 2023, after looking at the analytics for the website where The Right Thing weekly column gets posted after it has run in publications that carry it, it was clear that readers were most drawn to columns that touched on leaving jobs gracefully, maintaining privacy after death, showing gratitude in tough times and learning how to support children without doing their work for them.
In 2024, the top five columns focused on being an engaged citizen, companies that prop up bad behavior in advertisements, learning to lose gracefully, not allowing pretension to get in the way of our message and whether companies are obligated to honor commitments even if they were made in jest.
The fifth-most viewed column, “Fly me to the moon,” ran in late October. I wrote it shortly after a billionaire financed Elon Musk’s Polaris Dawn spaceflight for roughly $200 million. I reminisced about signing up for a “First Moon Flight Club” sponsored by Pan American Airways in the late 1960s. Pan Am is long gone as a company, but I argued that even if this was a marketing gimmick, if the company were still around and actually offering trips to the moon, it would do well to see if those who signed up were interested. Granted, few of us would be able to foot the bill. Nevertheless, it would be nice to be asked.
An August column, “Humor can be a funny thing,” was written in response to a series of television advertisements run by a national mattress company. The ads featured people behaving badly being asked how they slept at night. The response was always that they slept on one of the company’s mattresses. That the ads seemed to suggest that you too could behave badly if only you used our product struck me as an odd marketing strategy.
Using a line from Steely Dan about wanting a name when we lose, an October column, “How we lose can define us,” concluded that how we behave when we lose can go a long way toward sending a message about our character.
In September, I wrote in “Do too many signature credentials smack of pretension?” about how those who use too many initials and affiliations in their email signatures might come off as trying too hard to appear more impressive than they need to. It was best, I argued, not to let such things risk getting in the way of the message you were trying to convey.
Finally, by far the most viewed Right Thing column of the year was early November’s “Don’t get angry. Get to work.” I argued in the column that anger in response to some effort not going the way we wanted too often sapped our energy and distracted us from continuing to focus on other ways to achieve our goals. “If we were truly concerned about a cause, that cause doesn’t disappear because we didn’t get our way,” I wrote. “Rather than stew in anger or regret, the right thing seems to be to double down on any efforts to engage in whatever work is needed to set things straight.”
Thank you for continuing to email your questions, stories and reactions to The Right Thing column. May your years continue to be full of doing the right thing while surrounded by those who choose to do the same.
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.
