That's what's been going on in the grocery industry for the past 50 years. People love to shop and yet don't love to shop for groceries.

What's to love? Most of the stores are messy, the help is surly and the selection is at once lacking, overwhelming and worst of all, predictable.

Looking in from the outside, grocery appears to be the craziest business on earth. Well, with the possible exception of the airline business … or maybe the magazine business.

Shoppers would love nothing more than to love to shop for groceries. And the thing is, it would not be all that difficult to make grocery stores more lovable. Better lighting. Faster checkouts. Clerks who smile.

It's not as though grocers would have to blow themselves up or try to replicate Stew Leonard's, Trader Joe's or Wegman's (although that would be nice).

In fact, their model could be as simple as that of Amelia's Grocery Outlet. Amelia's is a so-called "salvage grocer" that trades in goods that are either damaged, discontinued or past their sell-by dates.

Don't laugh -- Amelia's same-store sales were up 12 percent last year, about twice the rate of Kroger. The reason isn't just the low prices. What shoppers say they love about Amelia's is that you just never know what you're going to find there. When you get down to it, isn't that what we love most about shopping?

So, surprise us. Pleasantly. Show us you understand who we are, what we want and what we need. We could learn to love grocery shopping yet.

The opening of this interesting report states...”Being a good corporate citizen has never been so challenging. Companies have long been under public scrutiny for practices ranging from recruitment to workplace safety, from attitudes to overseas investment to environmental pollution. The emergence of climate change as a mainstream political issue, however, has served to drive home the breadth of ethical issues with which firms must now grapple. The business—and societal—implications of how companies address these are so far reaching that a new area of management practice has come into being to manage them, known by many as “corporate sustainability”.

I have to be very careful about this because I've found I can get into some trouble. For example, I've typed the following sentences in emails:

Here's what we accomplished at the eternal meeting. (I meant external.)
That depends on his pubic speaking skills. (I meant public.)
In that case, Barack Obama would bean Hillary Clinton. (I meant beat -- hmmm, maybe not)
She has a bit part in the presentation. (I meant big.)

And my favorite,

This technique will help to jog your member. (I meant memory -- ahem.)

Then, of course, there are the many, many words for which my fingers just seem to want to transpose or rearrange letters:

from becomes form
new becomes knew
favorite becomes favority (for some strange reason)
community becomes communicty

not to mention the numerous grammatical errors, especially:

your instead of you're
to instead of too

Sometimes I feel like I'm in third grade.

Does anyone know what this phenomenon is called? Has it happened to you? If so, please share some examples.

Ruth Sherman • Ruth Sherman Associates LLC • High Stakes Communications • Greenwich, CT • www.ruthsherman.com

For example, as the linked article states, when something is “cool” now, it is “book,” since “book” is the word that comes up when you try to enter “cool” into predictive text. Similarly, “barmaid” reads as “carnage” and “mom” becomes “nun.” I realized it was kind of like running Spell Check and getting those weird suggestions for substitutions. And then I realized this could lead to some revolutionary inter-office memos that could definitely lighten things up and maybe even inject a little work/life humor balance into a busy day.

With that in mind, I typed out a fake memo with every other word or so intentionally misspelled so that I could then replace it with one of the words Spell Check came up with. This was the actual result:

Dear Heavenly Ones,

It has clump to my attentions that coverall employees are hooking the keys to the monks and women’s bathrooms and not rectifying them. Please take a memento to look abut you before you love the felicity and make sore you doesn’t left the key beyond or have leafed it in your picket and forget tin all about it. Also, third quainter profiteroles are down and we nerd to adders this at the Moonfish mourning meeting, pimply at 9 a.m.

Think you,

Tom

Weirdly enough, my daughter understood this completely. I say the sooner we introduce unedited predictive text-messaging into the business world, the less seriously we will take ourselves. If the above experimental memo is any indication, built-in word-analyzing software has the potential to really shake up the workplace. Why not try one of your own?

Take proposals, for example. I was just with a new client in Europe. This innovative and technically superior corporation had a challenge on their hands. They were driving a value strategy and customer centric messaging throughout their organization but not seeing bottom line results. When we were given sales and marketing collateral such as proposals, white papers, case studies, and a website to review, and conducted multiple interviews, the question we were asking ourselves was, “Where is their customer in this picture?” All this stuff was about the seller…their great achievements and super powerful products and services. We found that 90-plus percent of the content was about them and their solutions. There was a clear disconnect between the customer centric initiative and the organization’s ability to execute a great idea. We see this scenario repeat itself over and over again.

Where's the innovation? We tend to articualte customer-centric and value-added in generic and ultimately meaningless terms. As a self-check, compare your collateral, your proposals, your web sites with two of your best competitors. Shuffle them up and re-assign them. Is there a difference?

Ask yourself, in a customer centric organization, what percentage of the proposal should be about the solution, the solution provider and the future value benefits, and what percentage should be about the potential customer of that solution, their business, objectives, obstacles they face, and the critical issues that need to be resolved?

How does this play out in your company?

The bottom line is: innovation is driven by creating value and if you’ve placed the value strategy in play, why aren’t customers responding? Simply said, if you cannot create and clarify value and connect it to your customer’s world, they will not take action, they will not buy, and your customer centric organization is just smoke and mirrors.

I got to meet Kfir Pravda, who was here for a few hours in NYC Friday morning awaiting his connecting flight to Israel. I was familiar with Kfir from blogging as well as our involvement with the Yahoo Videoblogging Group.

We've had interesting discussions about the direction of online video and television, but I never figured I'd meet him in person, since I had no plans to travel to Israel.

Dear Lee,

Boy did you jump ship at the right time! The legal noose is tightening around the fossil fuel industry as the evidence of damages to planet earth from global warming stack up higher than an Oklahoma gusher. California sued automakers to recover costs to the state from greenhouse gases and other air pollution (much like tobacco companies that paid billions for health care costs because of their toxic air pollution). Those cars burn the products you sold for so long, so I’m guessing your old pals are next.

Apple is a great example of a company that has been coming out with cool products ever since Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started making and selling circuit boards and computers in the late 1970s. Apple’s latest computers and iGoodies are widely perceived as must-have products with people routinely lining up to buy them as they are launched. At $1800, the MacBook Air launched last month is the latest on Apple’s hit parade.

So what will happen if Apple loses its edge? Not a problem if it takes the same approach that Kodak did years ago when its traditional business of photographic films and papers turned to ashes. Kodak is a big company with a long history of introducing cool products that date all the way back to about 1900 when it introduced the very popular “brownie” camera. Kodak saw big problems coming when digital camera sales started going through the roof. Although the company was in the digital camera game from early on, it knew it would face very tough competition from Japanese consumer electronics giants. Kodak simply wasn’t going to remain cool as the competition heated up.

Kodak was able to refocus on B2B offerings using the tremendous credibility it had established over the previous century. The company’s investor information page claims “Kodak is the world’s foremost imaging innovator. With sales of $10.7 billion in 2006, the company is committed to a digitally oriented growth strategy focused on helping people better use meaningful images and information in their life and work. Consumers use Kodak’s system of digital and traditional products and services to take, print and share their pictures anytime, anywhere; Businesses effectively communicate with customers worldwide using Kodak solutions for prepress, conventional and digital printing and document imaging; and Creative Professionals rely on Kodak technology to uniquely tell their story through moving or still images.” These are not consumer product offerings that will have people lining up in droves. Apple brags about its iPhone and having sold over 110 million iPods and over three billion songs from its iTunes online store but it has no major current B2B offerings.

A great advantage of a company that has leveraged and built up credibility to shift from leading edge consumer product offerings towards B2B offerings, is that the business becomes more predictable. This also applies to its R&D returns. Watch and see if Apple remains cool and if it shifts toward increasing its B2B offerings over the next few years. That would decrease the likelihood of the company falling flat on its face if it loses its cool.

Atomica Creative > Strategic Product Marketing • Vancouver, Canada • tnakagawa@atomicacreative.com

Robert Montgomery Knight, nicknamed the General not only for his stint as coach at Army, but also for the discipline and control he exacted at Indiana and Texas Tech, has abruptly resigned. Saying he was tired after 42 years of coaching, Bobby Knight is handing the reins of this team to his designated successor and son, Pat Knight.

Let the dissection of his career begin. For some Bob Knight represented everything good and wholesome about intercollegiate athletics. His teams played as a unit. His kids graduated, most often within four years. He played by the rules. And he won -- 902 games, more than any other Division I coach. At Indiana, the Hoosiers won three national championships and he also coached the U.S. Olympic team to a gold medal. By any standard, Knight was, and is, a true champion, in the purest and most authentic sense.

But then there is the other side of Bob Knight. Mercurial, irrational, heated, arrogant and down right mean spirited. Bob Knight once threw a chair across the court during a game in Puerto Rico. He repeated bumped heads and thumped his players’ heads and chests with his hands. He was caught on videotape grabbing the neck (and possibly choking) one of his own players at practices. He insulted deans and university presidents and threw tantrums in his office as well as in press conferences.

Dissonance occurs when what you see and hear doesn't match what you feel and when that happens you step back and "buy out" vs. stepping forward and "buying in." Another way of saying it is: Dissonance = What are you going to do for me?/What are you going to do to me?

The dissonance that gets triggered in me with Hillary Clinton is that there are many things she is qualified to do for us, but it is nearly canceled out by the worry of what she will do to us, when she is unhappy with something. I plead no contest to that being a double standard that many strong women face, namely if a man is adamant, he is aggressive; if a woman is adamant she's a b**ch. There is another factor which adds to my dissonance. That's the Bill factor. He is as much a liability as an asset and if Hillary became president, I honestly don't know how much I would want him guiding her vs. her knowing her own mind and merely considering his input along with other advisors.

I know that in the corporate world there are many highly competent, but "people skill challenged" individuals that initially offend people, but once they get the job done and it helps everyone, their personality gets re-written (think Neutron Jack becoming Jack Welch, the best CEO of the last century).

Since "Super Tuesday" is yet to be decided, I will still go with Obama as President for the simple reason that if the world needs to see the US through different eyes, the world needs to believe that we have a president who is capable of looking at it through different eyes.

Something else that is not Hillary's fault is that she represents the not so endearing part of "baby boomers" who are trying to desperately hold onto power rather than accepting that it is no longer their turn. I think the world would do well to have all the "baby boomers" pass the baton to the next generation(s) and give them their shot, graciously but not aggressively offering input whenever it is sought.

I don't know how capable "baby boomers" are of letting go of the command and control that they have had for so long. I know that being a baby boomer, I struggle with that.

When coming up with your questions, there are two things to keep in mind—audience and quality. Audience is important because you’re typically going to want to gear your questions to the position of the person you’re interviewing with. For example, when speaking with someone in human resources, a lot of your questions will likely be around training and the hiring process. In that case, it’s okay to ask about the mentoring program. If you’re speaking with someone in a senior-level position, most of your questions will be about big picture, strategic initiatives. Meaning, you wouldn’t want to ask a vice president of the company about the number of vacation days you’d get.

Equally as important as your audience is the quality of your questions. Interviewers want to know that you’ve done your homework. Take what you learned from your research on the company and industry, and incorporate that information into your questions. For example, if you are interviewing with a company in the energy sector, you might ask how they’re positioning themselves in the marketplace to end users given the high price of gasoline. Or, if you are speaking with someone in the pharmaceutical industry, you might ask how they continue to grow and innovate given existing and future Medicare and Medicaid regulations.

Of course, you can also use the Q&A portion of the interview as a chance to incorporate things you might have forgotten to mention earlier. It can happen to the best of us: even when we’re over-prepared and on our game, there are always a few things we fail to highlight. Look for opportunities to wrap them into your conversation.

Don’t let the questions you ask hurt your chances of getting an offer. Spend time coming up with ones that show the interviewer that you’ve done your homework and that you understand the business and industry they’re in. And, the same holds true when you’re evaluating interviewees. Although only a small portion of the overall interview process, the quality of the questions they ask can speak volumes.

And don’t waste time asking about a typical day because there’s no such thing.

Shawn Graham is an Associate Director with the MBA Career Management Center at UNC's Kenan-Flagler Business School and author of Courting Your Career: Match Yourself with the Perfect Job (courtingyourcareer.wordpress.com).