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Serve the ‘Lazy Grapefruit’

January 16, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How to Supreme Citrus Fruits 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.

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  3. Deliver The Punchline First
  4. How to … Prepare to Be Interviewed by The Media
  5. How You Make a Memorable Elevator Speech

Filed Under: Effective Communication, Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Assertiveness, Communication, Critical Thinking, Meetings, Persuasion, Presentations, Thought Process

Our 10 Most Popular Articles of 2022

December 30, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Top Blog Articles of 2022 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 RSS feeds.

  • Choose a better response. Don’t accept reflexive reactions. Instead, learn to know there is a “space” before responding.
  • To be more productive, try doing less. The best way to get lots of things done is to not do them at all.
  • The good of working for a micromanager: be aware of the details your manager cares about and expect to learn a lot.
  • A hack to resist temptation: commit to not giving in for 15 minutes. Even a simple distraction can break the trance.
  • Get good at things by being bad first. If you aren’t willing to be bad initially, you’ll never get started on anything new.
  • Get rid of relationship clutter. Make room for more supportive and nurturing relationships.
  • Don’t be a prisoner of the hurt done to you. While you are the victim of another who has caused you some suffering, she herself is also a victim of suffering.
  • Nothing like a word of encouragement to provide a lift. Everyone needs hope. Look for honest ways to offer even a little nudge of encouragement.
  • The secret to happiness in relationships is lowering your expectations. You’d be happier to accept other people’s difficult behaviors when you expect less from them.
  • Cancel culture has a condescension problem. If we can’t stand up for the right to speech that we dislike, why keep the right to the speech we do like?

And here are some articles of yesteryear that continue to be popular:

  • Lessons on adversity from Charlie Munger
  • If you’re looking for bad luck, you’ll soon find it
  • The power of negative thinking
  • Fight ignorance, not each other
  • The Fermi Rule & Guesstimation
  • Don’t let small decisions destroy your productivity
  • How smart companies get smarter
  • How to manage smart, powerful leaders
  • Care less for what other people think
  • Expressive writing can help you heal
  • Accidents can happen when you least expect

We wish you all a healthy and prosperous 2023!

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  1. Accidents Can Happen When You Least Expect Them: The Overconfidence Effect
  2. Making Tough Decisions with Scant Data
  3. Lessons from David Dao Incident: Watch Out for the Availability Bias!
  4. How to Solve a Problem By Standing It on Its Head
  5. Rapoport’s Rules to Criticize Someone Constructively

Filed Under: Managing People, Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Critical Thinking, Decision-Making, Getting Along, Mindfulness, Thought Process

Be Smart by Not Being Stupid

December 12, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Be Smart by Not Being Stupid No superhuman ability is usually required to dodge the many foolish choices to which we’re prone. A few basic rules are all that’s required to shield you, if not from all errors, from silly errors.

Charlie Munger often emphasizes that minimizing mistakes may be one of the least appreciated tricks in successful investing. He has reputedly credited much of Berkshire Hathaway’s success to consistently avoiding stupidity. “It is remarkable how much long-term advantage we have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid instead of trying to be very intelligent.” And, “I think part of the popularity of Berkshire Hathaway is that we look like people who have found a trick. It’s not brilliance. It’s just avoiding stupidity.” They’ve avoided investing in situations they don’t understand or summon experience.

As a policy, avoiding stupidity in investing shouldn’t mean avoiding risk wholly; rather, it’s taking on risk only when there’s a fine chance that you’ll be properly rewarded for assuming that risk.

Idea for Impact: Tune out stupidity. Becoming successful in life isn’t always about what you do, but what you don’t do. In other words, improving decision quality is often more about decreasing your chances of failure than increasing your chances of success.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Accidents Can Happen When You Least Expect Them: The Overconfidence Effect
  2. Making Tough Decisions with Scant Data
  3. More Data Isn’t Always Better
  4. How to Solve a Problem By Standing It on Its Head
  5. Smart Folks are Most Susceptible to Overanalyzing and Overthinking

Filed Under: MBA in a Nutshell, Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Biases, Critical Thinking, Decision-Making, Problem Solving, Risk, Thinking Tools, Thought Process, Wisdom

The Creativity of the Unfinished

December 8, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Bull's Head, 1942 by Pablo Picasso Don’t dot every I and cross every T. Leave a stone unturned.

Ignore a rule. Don’t tie up every loose end.

Leave some questions unanswered. Let something be out of place.

Violate the expectation and usher a realm of potentiality. As American artist Julia Cameron noted in her seminal self-help book The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity (1992,) “Art needs time to incubate, to sprawl a little, to be ungainly and misshapen and finally emerge as itself. The ego hates this fact. The ego wants instant gratification and the addictive hit of an acknowledged win.”

A piece of art, a movie, a melodic line, or a production all tend to be more captivating when they leave you wondering—when they urge you to explore the possibilities your mind has to offer.

Wondering what to read next?

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  3. Finding Potential Problems & Risk Analysis: A Case Study on ‘The Three Faces of Eve’
  4. Turning a Minus Into a Plus … Constraints are Catalysts for Innovation
  5. Constraints Inspire Creativity: How IKEA Started the “Flatpack Revolution”

Filed Under: Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Artists, Clutter, Creativity, Critical Thinking, Innovation, Mental Models, Thought Process

Lessons from the Japanese Decision-Making Process

November 10, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Ringi Seido - Decision-Making Process in Japanese Management Systems Japanese firms traditionally use the ringi seido (“request for approval system”) to make critical decisions. A proposal is circulated to appropriate people, advancing from lower to higher ranks. As the proposal works through the management layers before landing at the top, each participant puts their stamp (the hanko) on the document.

This collective consensus process allows for a greater number of reasonable alternatives to be considered and for the risk to be spread. Although it may be slow, the implementation is faster once the decision is made. (Since the early ’90s, Toyota has followed a “three-stamp movement,” restricting the number of people needing to approve a proposal to three.)

Unlike consensus management in the west, the ringi system is often used to appease factions in an institution. Given the Japanese norms (nemawashi) of social structure and intercultural communication, everybody tends to be very diplomatic when giving an opinion. A decision isn’t made if unanimity isn’t reached.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Serve the ‘Lazy Grapefruit’
  2. To Make an Effective Argument, Explain Your Opponent’s Perspective
  3. How to Argue like the Wright Brothers
  4. Deliver The Punchline First
  5. How You Make a Memorable Elevator Speech

Filed Under: Business Stories, Effective Communication, Leading Teams Tagged With: Conflict, Critical Thinking, Japan, Meetings, Persuasion, Presentations, Teams, Thought Process

3 Ways to … Manage for Creativity

October 21, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How to Manage for Creativity Managers can create the conditions for innovation by encouraging a culture of being creative—not just productive—and razing barriers that stifle individual expression.

  1. Get less formal. Foster a culture characterized by a tolerance for failure and a willingness to experiment. Involve everyone and welcome great ideas from everywhere. Make sure everyone feels free to speak out: people will own solutions if they’ve been involved in the decision-making.
  2. Simplify the workplace. Look at things with a fresh eye, as an outsider might—sometimes you’re too close to things to see the truth. Drop unnecessary work, and explore what routines can be phased out or improved. Work with coworkers to eliminate extraneous loops and redundancies if your organization has far too many rules, approvals, and forms. Streamline decision-making.
  3. Defy tradition. If no one can recall why your team does something a particular way, the task is likely more convoluted than it needs to be. Hold a ‘why do we do it that way?’ challenge. Invite colleagues from different teams to come in and look at things in a detached way. Figure out what’s relevant and necessary (and what’s not) and frequently reevaluate the priority list as new things are added.

Idea for Impact: Managing for creativity is a conscious effort in experimentation.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Overcoming Personal Constraints is a Key to Success
  2. Creativity—It Takes a Village: A Case Study of the 3M Post-it Note
  3. Many Creative People Think They Can Invent Best Working Solo
  4. Four Ideas for Business Improvement Ideas
  5. Evolution, Not Revolution

Filed Under: Mental Models, The Great Innovators Tagged With: Creativity, Critical Thinking, Innovation, Problem Solving, Teams, Thought Process

To Rejuvenate Your Brain, Give it a Break

August 25, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

To Rejuvenate Your Brain, Give it a Break Research suggests that once you hit a “plateau of productivity,” the number of hours you work without a break is inversely proportional to how much you’ll accomplish.

Even brief escapes such as a walk in nature or a run around the block can clear your head and rejuvenate the brain. Just leave the phone behind and seek novelty (e.g., noticing something new or taking different paths.) Engage your mind with the world instead of worrying about the work you’re supposedly taking a break from.

Downtime allows the brain to refresh the specific neural network you’ve been using, make new connections, and inspire you to fresh approaches to tasks.

Idea for Impact: Intermittent escapism can be valuable. It distracts the brain from useless worry, helps generate out-of-the-box ideas, and may even restore a sense of wonder.

Novelist Neil Gaiman said it better, “People talk about escapism as if it’s a bad thing… Once you’ve escaped and come back, the world is not the same as when you left it. You return to it with skills, weapons, and knowledge you didn’t have before. Then you are better equipped to deal with your current reality.”

Wondering what to read next?

  1. How to Clear Your Mental Horizon
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  3. Everything in Life Has an Opportunity Cost
  4. Make a Habit of Stepping Back from Work
  5. Lessons from the Princeton Seminary Experiment: People in a Rush are Less Likely to Help Others (and Themselves)

Filed Under: Health and Well-being, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Balance, Decision-Making, Discipline, Mindfulness, Stress, Thought Process

Why Investors Keep Backing Unprofitable Business Models

July 29, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Why Investors Keep Backing Unprofitable Business Models Investors have heaped billions into Q-Commerce—especially the rapid grocery startups—hoping to hook consumers on the convenience of groceries that would turn up immediately, sometimes in minutes.

I’ve never really fathomed how the small-basket orders of low-margin groceries can endlessly compensate for the labor costs and overheads, even after discontinuing the generous referral bonuses, discount codes, and freebies enticing customers. The prospects may evolve if these startups subsist on ever more funding and develop massive businesses with efficiencies from scale. But then they’re right in Amazon’s wheelhouse.

Idea for Impact: Some business models are never created to be profitable, and investors should be wary of encouraging—and funding—loss-making propositions. The lure of backing an initial entrant, capturing market share, and then selling out to a more determined fool isn’t viable! Who needs goods delivered in such a rush for such charges, anyway?

Wondering what to read next?

  1. The Loss Aversion Mental Model: A Case Study on Why People Think Spirit is a Horrible Airline
  2. Your Product May Be Excellent, But Is There A Market For It?
  3. The Myth of the First-Mover Advantage
  4. A Real Lesson from the Downfall of Theranos: Silo Mentality
  5. Innovation’s Valley of Death

Filed Under: Business Stories, The Great Innovators Tagged With: Entrepreneurs, Ethics, Innovation, Marketing, Persuasion, Strategy, Thought Process

Sometimes a Conflict is All About the Process

July 27, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Sometimes a Conflict is All About the Process There’s a considerable difference between a “decision conflict” and a “process conflict,” and it’s necessary to disentangle the two.

A decision conflict is about a choice or another to be made. But a process conflict is about the approach, e.g., where making a choice has lacked rigorous deliberation (haste, a lack of participation from essential stakeholders, contempt for shared priorities, lack of attention to the tradeoffs, and so forth.) A sound decision has ensued from a meticulous-enough thought process, even if the decision emerges to be defective in the fullness of time.

Idea for Impact: Worry about bad decision processes. Make the “how” the anchor for your decision-making process. Improving the quality of decisions is developing better frameworks for making those decisions.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Accidents Can Happen When You Least Expect Them: The Overconfidence Effect
  2. Making Tough Decisions with Scant Data
  3. Be Smart by Not Being Stupid
  4. Why Risk Mitigation and Safety Measures Become Ineffective: Risk Homeostasis and Peltzman Effect [Mental Models]
  5. How Stress Impairs Your Problem-Solving Capabilities: Case Study of TransAsia Flight 235

Filed Under: Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Biases, Confidence, Conflict, Decision-Making, Risk, Thought Process

What if Something Can’t Be Measured

July 4, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Spirit Airlines---Route Feasibility Decisions During a September-2021 Airlines Confidential podcast (via Gary Leff’s View from the Wing,) former Spirit Airlines CEO Ben Baldanza told an exciting story about the airline industry’s systematic approach to reckon if potential new routes are economically feasible:

For the most part, airlines rely on data—required and reported by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics—on ticket purchases that show the number of people flying a given route and what price. For example, New Orleans, which is home to one of the largest Honduran populations in the U.S., has not had direct service to Honduras. Spirit Airlines will therefore analyze data from Sabre Market Intelligence for 2019 showing O&D (Origin and Destination) traffic between New Orleans and Honduras.

Sometimes, though, there’s no data on historical demand on a route, such as when Spirit Airlines was considering service to Armenia, Colombia. There hadn’t ever been a U.S. carrier flying into the airport, so there wasn’t available traffic data Spirit could access. Instead, Spirit looked at telephone data and migrant remittance statistics to get a sense of ties between the U.S. and the Latin American city. Spirit studied the frequency with which people were calling friends and relatives and how much money and how frequently money was being remitted as a reliable metric to determine if the new route was viable.

Spirit Airlines relies heavily on leisure bookings, especially visiting friends and relatives (VFR) traffic. In the absence of historical yield data for a route being considered, Spirit used fund transfers to Latin America as a stand-in variable.

Substitute Variables and Proxy Metrics: What if Something Can't Be Measured 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.

Idea for Impact: Relying on intuition for sound decision-making isn’t sustainable, so folks need a systematic approach to making those decisions. Use meaningful proxy and surrogate metrics in your decisions to help overcome inherent biases with what can’t be measured.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. The Data Never “Says”
  2. Making Tough Decisions with Scant Data
  3. Be Smart by Not Being Stupid
  4. Why Your Judgment Sucks // Summary of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)
  5. How to Solve a Problem By Standing It on Its Head

Filed Under: Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Biases, Critical Thinking, Decision-Making, Persuasion, Problem Solving, Thinking Tools, Thought Process

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About: Nagesh Belludi [hire] is a St. Petersburg, Florida-based freethinker, investor, and leadership coach. He specializes in helping executives and companies ensure that the overall quality of their decision-making benefits isn’t compromised by a lack of a big-picture understanding.

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Unless otherwise stated in the individual document, the works above are © Nagesh Belludi under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. You may quote, copy and share them freely, as long as you link back to RightAttitudes.com, don't make money with them, and don't modify the content. Enjoy!