When all goes wrong, patience can help

How should you respond when a speaker’s presentation goes woefully wrong?

Several years ago, I was invited to moderate a panel of business executives responding to ethical situations I presented to them on stage in front of a large audience in downtown Richmond, Virginia. The panel of executives was seated across the stage. I was standing so I could roam a bit as I posed questions.

As we got started, the audio technicians connected a lavalier microphone to my necktie and had me place the transmitter for it in my pocket. They carefully showed me how to turn it on when I was about to introduce the panel members.

The auditorium filled. The executives walked to their assigned seats and sat down. As I recall there was a brief introduction of me by someone offstage and then I walked on, turned on my microphone and was greeted by intense screeching feedback. I tried turning the microphone off and on with no luck. The audio tech quickly came out, removed the lavalier microphone connected to me, and attached a different lavalier microphone. I turned it on. More screeching that they couldn’t figure out.

As he removed that lavalier microphone, the audience began to chuckle a bit, particularly as I held up my forefinger and told them I’d be with them in a minute. Another tech came out with a handheld wireless microphone, but before he left he had me turn it on and try it out. I did and it worked fine. As he handed me a second handheld microphone, the audience could hear him say something to the effect of: “Here, stick this one in your pocket just in case.” And then he walked off.

The audience, who perhaps wasn’t supposed to hear his directive, broke into applause as he left the stage. As the applause subsided, they were still laughing as we began and seemed far more relaxed than they had been when they walked into the room.

We started in on the program of posing ethical questions and the audience was among the most attentive and engaged I’d experienced.

The executives were relaxed and patiently waited as we resolved the audience issues. The tech guys never panicked but continued to try to solve the challenge, even adding a bit of humor to their attempts at the end, even if the humor was unintended. Partly because I kept talking to them without a microphone – or at least tried to by shouting – the audience never seemed to grow restless. Instead, they seemed to have empathy for what they knew must have been a bit of a nerve-wracking few minutes for me and the techs.

The audience’s grace and understanding about circumstances beyond my control has stuck with me. I also learned that more often than not an audience will stick with you if they believe you are trying to do good work.

Occasionally, I have wondered if it might be a good idea to hope something goes wrong prior to every talk, but that wonder quickly dissipates. Instead, my appreciation for the audience’s response that day has reinforced my belief that having patience with others when they might be struggling to do something is the right thing to do. I still haven’t perfected my ability to do this. Nevertheless, I persist.

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.

How much does a columnist owe his readers to write something new?

Does a columnist owe it to his readers to let them know if he is actually writing new material?

Writing a weekly column can be a chore. If you’re trying to do it on top of working a full-time job, meeting family obligations and trying to live a balanced life, sometimes it can be downright oppressive.

I bring this up having just finished teaching two intensive January-term courses on column writing. Each course met from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday, with two finished columns due by midnight on Friday. Writing two columns a week can be daunting, particularly to those who have never written a column before.

To give students in each class some perspective, I remind them that from 1935 until 1962, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote her “My Day” column. She did this while being first lady of the United States, helping to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and doing other stuff that involved being Eleanor Roosevelt. Until 1961, she wrote six columns a week. In 1962, she cut back to three columns a week until September. She died in November 1962.

Not every column was a literary masterpiece, but they were reportedly widely read and influential. I remind students of this not to shame them, but to encourage them to find their inner Eleanor Roosevelt if they want to write columns regularly.

Near as I can tell, Roosevelt never recycled any of her columns and tried to pass them off as new to leverage her time. That technique is tempting to me as I am now writing the 1,152nd “The Right Thing” column.

Shortly after ChatGPT became available, there was a spate of articles that appeared by writers who acknowledged they were produced by ChatGPT as a way of showing what the bot could do. But doing that quickly became a gimmick and cliched.

There are enough Right Thing columns floating around the internet that I can easily ask ChatGPT to write a column on a particular topic at a particular length in the style of Jeffrey Seglin’s Right Thing column. As research, I tried this and ChatGPT kicked something out in 12.3 seconds. So on those weeks when I am feeling particularly overwhelmed or just plain lazy, why not recycle something I wrote years ago or have ChatGPT write my column for me, a task it can do far more quickly than I can?

As tempting as either might be, each would be wrong unless I told the readers that that was exactly what I was doing. I do revisit topics I’ve written about before if it seems relevant to do so, but I always disclose that I’m doing so to readers and I’ve never just run the same column that ran years ago.

And while ChatGPT can point out copy that is serviceable, it can’t draw from the same experiences I have nor make the same judgments I try to make each week when trying to wrestle with some issue or another.

If the weekly column feels like too much of a chore to write or procrastination seems to be winning out, the right thing is to hunker down and write. It’s a privilege to be able to write for you each week and that, for now, is motivation enough to assure you that the words I use are both new and my own.

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.

Should existing customers also get good deals?

Are companies wrong to offer incentives to new customers that they don’t offer to existing customers?

I was a fan of the former television critic for the Boston Globe before he stepped down from the position after holding it for 27 years. His take on which shows were worth watching generally matched my own taste. Often, however, he would recommend a show that appeared on a streaming service to which I didn’t subscribe. On more than one occasion, his recommendation to readers who balked at paying for yet another streaming service was that they take advantage of the many free trial offers that often allowed new viewers several months for free. After that, he advised, you could cancel before the fees kicked in.

Alas, I had no interest in keeping track of which services I needed to cancel before the trial was up. Admittedly, there has never been a television show I’ve missed that made me feel as if my life was somehow less complete. But his advice reminded me of a recent question from a reader about whether it was fair that companies offered incentives to new customers that weren’t offered to existing customers.

The reader, whom we’re calling Clare, had been seeing advertisements from her cable television service, her cell phone provider, and other service providers that offered either better rates or attractive product discounts to new subscribers. The offers were far better than what she was receiving as an existing customer. On the one occasion she called her cable provider and waited on hold for several minutes, she was told the offers she saw were indeed not for her.

The only way Clare figured she might get some of these incentives would be to cancel whatever service she’d been getting and then wait to sign up as a new customer. But even if that were permitted, that meant the possibility of living without television service for a spell. It was hardly worth the effort Clare figured, but it was something she found annoying.

Clare wonders if it’s unethical for companies to offer new customers offers they don’t offer to existing customers.

There’s nothing wrong with companies offering incentives to attract new customers as long as they are clear and honest about whatever it is they are offering. Clare herself may have been attracted to her providers initially because of a new customer incentive. Companies do run the risk of annoying existing customers with such offers, but such risks are likely worth it to them to build up their client base. If Clare is annoyed to the point of wanting to search for new service providers, she should do that if such offers are available.

Even if there’s nothing wrong with such offers, there’s also nothing wrong with companies making sure their existing customers are rewarded for their loyalty by offering them incentives to stick around. Might cable television or cell phone providers lock in customers for life if, say, for every 10 years of being a customer they received a break on their bill or even a month free? Perhaps, no matter how unlikely it is for them to exhibit such gratitude.

As long as companies make clear to customers what they are paying for and for how long, they are doing the right thing. Customers should be able to make as informed a decision as possible.

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.

Readers share their acts of kindness

In December, I shared a story of a young couple who surprised my wife and me by raking up several dozen bags of leaves from our yard when we were away. Their unexpected act of kindness touched us.

Readers responded with their own stories of kindness. Here are some of them.

A reader from Santa Rosa, California, recounted the time he and his wife were driving home and saw a young woman and baby on the shoulder of the freeway near her broken down car. They stopped and used their car service membership to call a tow truck and had it take the woman, baby and broken car to her home across town.

Another reader from Sebastopol, California, and her siblings spread kindness to honor their father. His 90th birthday “seemed like a big deal” so the siblings asked friends and family to do random acts of kindness for others in honor of their dad, and then write a brief note about their act. The siblings compiled more than 90 notes of kindness in a notebook and presented them to their father. “He was touched, but I think a little embarrassed that people, many of whom he didn't even know, had gone out of their way on his behalf.”

In 1960, a reader from North Carolina, was a college student in love. One night, the woman he had hoped to marry after graduating responded “no” when he asked over the phone if she loved him. The reader told his roommate he planned to hitchhike 200 miles to his girlfriend’s university to talk to her. His car-owning roommate responded, “let’s go,” and drove him there. He waited in his car while they broke up, and then drove them back to their own campus. The romance fizzled, but the kindness between roommates thrived.

Finally, a story arrived from a reader from Pennsylvania. Her son-in-law and his father had taken her grandson to a college basketball game. The following day the grandson was to take part in a children’s basketball clinic. During the game, the son-in-law heard a dad tell his son they couldn’t afford a clinic ticket. He spoke to the dad and bought a ticket for his son.

A day after they returned home, the son-in-law’s mother was Christmas shopping. She noticed the checkout clerk seemed stressed. When she told the clerk how great a job she was doing, the clerk teared up and said, “You have no idea how much I needed to hear that.” The woman left, headed to the bank, withdrew $100, returned to the store, and handed the money to the clerk who was gathering her things to leave. “Now I can buy groceries,” the clerk said as she hugged her. The woman called her son’s wife to let her know what happened and to tell her that her son had inspired her. Her son had never told his wife what he had done. His mother only knew because her husband overheard their son at the game.

“To me, this is the best,” the reader from Pennsylvania wrote, “when you share that kindness quietly, without recognition – just purely to be kind.”

Whether it’s quiet kindness or a louder variation, offering when possible to help others who might be in need remains the right thing to do. Continue to share your stories of kindness offered and I will continue to try to share them.

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.