I love grapefruits, but they’re messy. Not quite as messy as eating mangos, though. Peeling a grapefruit also leaves a filmy residue on the hands that doesn’t come off easily, even with soap or hand sanitizer.
A professional chef recently coached me on suprêming a grapefruit. This method is a little time-consuming, but the results—no rind, no pith, no skin, no mess—totally worth it! The chef calls it “Serving the Lazy Grapefruit.”
Now that’s an excellent metaphor.
When you give presentations, especially when you pitch to busy executives, you should serve them the ‘lazy grapefruit.’
Too many presentations are put together like a whole grapefruit—the audience is made to go through the trouble of picking the juiciest fare themselves.
Especially so when you’re presenting to busy executives—they tend to be incredibly impatient and often have little time to weigh options. To present the ‘lazy grapefruit’ is to remove the rind and peel in your presentation from the shell of unnecessary details and then serve the kernel to them in an appealing, easily consumable, least-messy form.
Your audience will relish the clarity provided by anyone who’s made an effort to make the message straightforward.
Boil your message down to the essentials and figure out precisely what they’ll need to know and why it’s important to them, and then lay it out in an orderly and logical manner.
Elevate your presentation. It’s more difficult to make your message simpler, but it’s worth the effort.
Idea for Impact: Do the thinking so your audience doesn’t have to.
Here are our most popular exclusive features of 2022. Pass this on to your friends; if they like these, they can sign up to receive our 
No superhuman ability is usually required to dodge the many foolish choices to which 
Japanese firms traditionally use the 
Managers can create the conditions for innovation by encouraging a culture of being creative—not just productive—and razing barriers that stifle individual expression.
Research suggests that once you hit a 
Investors have 
There’s a considerable difference between a “decision conflict” and a “process conflict,” and it’s necessary to disentangle the two.
During a September-2021 
A surrogate metric or proxy metric is exactly that—a substitute used in place of a variable of interest when that variable can’t be measured directly or is difficult to measure. For example, per-capita GDP is often a proxy for the standard of living, and the value of a house is a stand-in for the household’s wealth. Freight tonnage is often a proxy for economic activity.