What’s the difference between authenticity and charisma?  Authenticity you can do alone.  It’s authentic (for someone) to sit out on the screen porch, strum your banjo, and sing sad songs to the moon.  It’s not particularly charismatic – unless you’ve got an enraptured audience of 500 listening in the front yard.  Charisma requires a crowd. 

That’s the simple distinction.  Going into a little more detail, authenticity requires that you show us your heart.  Passion is involved, but so is time; we believe someone to be authentic who has demonstrated consistency over a longer period of time than an instant or two. 

Charisma, on the other hand, is all about the moment, and having an audience.  First of all, it requires an awareness that the audience is aware of you.  Truly charismatic people know that people are looking at them (it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy) and –crucially – they enjoy it. 

And it requires self-awareness, along with an ability to display a range of emotions.  The single biggest deterrent that stops business people from being charismatic is that they believe that showing emotion is weak or wrong.  And so they give us emotional ‘monochromatism’. 

Finally, there’s an element of surprise.  Jack Nicholson is charismatic, in part, because he can emote hilarity at one moment and homicidal rage at another.  You can’t take your eyes off him because you never know what he’s going to do next.

Obviously, for business people, Jack Nicholson’s range is too much of a good thing.  But somewhere between stolid and Jack is the right pitch for business people who want to be more charismatic than a sea sponge. 

I talk about these qualities in lots more detail in Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, just out from Jossey-Bass (http://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Steps-Authenticity-Charisma/dp/0470404353/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1229113611&sr=1-1).  Authenticity and charisma matter enormously today because people are so jaded from all the economic and moral shocks of the past few years, and because celebrity is increasingly the coin of the realm.  Business people can't do business without a solid dose of the former and they can't thrive without at least a little of the latter.