What a business memoir captures that a résumé never can

For most of my career, I’ve watched senior leaders treat their lives like finely tuned machines—every achievement logged, every role described, every accomplishment fitted neatly into a résumé-shaped container. And it works, right up until the moment it doesn’t. Because at some point, even the most decorated résumé feels curiously hollow. It lists everything you did, yet somehow says nothing about who you were.

This is the core existential crisis of accomplished people: the résumé is a record of contribution, but the legacy is a record of meaning. A résumé tells the world how you moved through your career; a legacy tells the world why it mattered that you were here at all.

That’s why I tell leaders—CEOs, founders, board chairs, the quietly influential and the loudly impactful—that the memoir is not a vanity project. It’s the only form that can hold the weight of a life. And if you’re relying on your résumé to speak for you after you retire, step down, sell the company, or simply move into the next chapter of your life, you’re betting your legacy on a document designed for HR software.

Your Story, Not Your Statistics

A résumé was built to be short, bloodless, and transactional. A memoir, if written honestly, is built to be true. And truth is where your legacy lives.

I’ve never met a leader whose résumé captured their most important moment. Not once. The turning points that shaped them are almost always invisible to the public record. They happened in boardrooms where no minutes were taken, or on long drives home in the rain after a brutal decision, or in the two years when everything looked fine from the outside while everything inside them was cracking. Résumés are allergic to these moments. They don’t know what to do with humanity.

A memoir, on the other hand, requires humanity. It demands it, actually. You can’t write a memoir without wrestling with your doubts, your misjudgments, your second thoughts, your private victories, your hidden losses, and the handful of hinge moments that changed the trajectory of your life. A résumé lists roles; a memoir reveals the cost of those roles.

And here’s the strange thing: it’s the cost that people remember. It’s the cost that teaches. It’s the cost that becomes your legacy.

When I interview senior leaders, they often begin by reciting résumé bullet points out loud, as if I’m a hiring committee. They talk about expansions, restructurings, turnarounds, acquisitions. And then—if I wait long enough—something remarkable happens. A memory surfaces that isn’t résumé-friendly at all. A moment of fear. A moment of grace. A mistake they still think about. A conversation that redirected their life. These memories are never polished. They have no punchlines. They don’t present well.

The truth under the truth.

The résumé version of leadership is a fantasy: clean, efficient, certain. The memoir version is the real one: messy, emotional, improvisational, and so full of risk that it’s a wonder any company survives long enough to employ anyone at all. You cannot build a legacy on fantasy. You can build it only on candor.

I’ve seen leaders cling to their résumé because it feels safer. It’s the version of their life that causes no trouble. It offends no one, reveals nothing, and quietly suggests that the universe always bent in their favor. But the truth is the opposite: the universe rarely bent at all. They bent. They adapted. They sacrificed. They bet the future on a gut feeling that made no rational sense. They lost sleep, lost confidence, lost people, lost money. They carried burdens no one around them fully understood.

That’s the story their children don’t know. Their employees don’t know. Their successors don’t know. Their industry certainly doesn’t know. And when they leave their role for the final time, the résumé leaves with them—sterile, thin, untroubled by the humanity it omits.

A memoir preserves the part of the story the résumé can’t even acknowledge: the inner life of leadership.

And that inner life is where legacy lives. It’s the only thing that can’t be automated, replaced, restructured, or rewritten by someone else. It’s the part future leaders can learn from. It’s the part your successors can feel. It’s the part your family will recognize as unmistakably you.

A résumé is about qualification. A memoir is about identity. One helps you get a job. The other explains why your life’s work mattered.

Whenever a leader tells me they’re thinking about writing a memoir “someday,” I tell them the same thing: your legacy is being written already. The question is whether you want a hand in shaping it. Because if you don’t, the world will do it for you—and the world is notoriously bad at nuance.

A memoir is not a luxury for people with time on their hands. For serious leaders, it’s a necessity—the only place big enough, honest enough, and human enough to contain the truth of a life well lived.

Your résumé is for your career.

Your memoir is for your legacy.