Our company has been losing money for the last two years. We had consultants visiting us to analyse the problems that our company has been having. They found a lot of points where we need to improve, but in a nutshell (kurz zusammengefasst), we are spending way too much money.
The the concept of something being small enough to fit in a nutshell goes back to Pliny the Elder, who in AD 77 described a copy of Homer’s Iliad written small enough to fit in a nutshell. In Hamlet, Shakespeare has his protagonist say „I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.“
But the idiomatic meaning of „in a nutshell“ as „saying something in few words“ didn’t emerge until the 19th century. Thackeray used it in The Second Funeral of Napoleon, 1841 „Here, then, in a nutshell, you have the whole matter.“