Books and Articles by Ray Anthony

Sooner or later in your professional life, you’ll have to give a really important presentation. By focusing on several distinct and unique aspects of creating a presentation (topic selection, audience analysis, visual design, and delivery technology and techniques), you can develop the skills to give innovative, stimulating presentations with consistently positive results.

Thinker types, who may make up your innovative presentation audience, frequent the fields of finance, law, engineering, science, and technology. After Directors, competent and successful Thinkers often occupy the C-suite, running major businesses and organizations. The extreme left-brain human computer, Mr. Spock from Star Trek, is the epitome of the hyper-cerebral, but detached and impersonal archetype Thinker.

Whether you call them hostile, inflammatory, or emotionally-charged questions, some of innovative presentation questions are biased and designed to instigate trouble, discredit your points or recommendations, put you on the spot, make you defensive, or even attack your credibility and competence. Always expect the unexpected attack.

Contrasts show striking differences between two things. An innovative presentation presenter at a software design conference speaks about advances in 3-D gaming animation where the facial hair, skin, and other physical features of animated characters are almost indistinguishable from photographs of actual people.

The best innovative presenters in the world agree on the extraordinary power of storytelling in business or even technical presentations because you can include all kinds of content (facts, statistics, examples, explanations) within the format. Stories have a bottom-line moral along with key messages and learning(s) that reveal purpose.

How you begin your innovative presentation makes a difference. Think about your first romantic kiss, your first car, your first job, or the first time you achieved something you were so proud of. Now, think about a negative first occurrence, a painful or embarrassing memory. Positive or negative, you remember meaningful firsts of any kind quite vividly, often for a lifetime.

These optimistic personalities love an imaginative innovative presentation because they adore novelty and innovations of all sorts. Energizers are fun-loving, highly sociable, and sometimes flamboyant personalities who can be the life of the party. Journalist and bubbly television personality Katie Couric and the supremely entrepreneurial and charismatic benefactor Oprah Winfrey are typical Energizers, throwing off positive energy in all directions.

Rehearsing differs from practicing your innovative presentation, which is improving your general speaking techniques through a simple form of repetitive behavior with the goal of becoming articulate and polished with a custom-designed presentation or speech, especially one that you give for the first time. Rehearsing is standing up, using your presentation visuals, and delivering your material word-for-word out loud — without missing any detail — as if you were doing it for real.

Augmented reality (AR) apps enhance what you see and show you more. They can be a great addition to innovative presentations. AR apps insert virtual images in a real environment or give you more information about something you see, such as a video from the tourism board when you point your smartphone or tablet at an ad on the train into town.