The executive bio,
which is not a shorter CV.
A bio is written in the third person, in continuous prose, to be read aloud or skimmed on a website. It exists to introduce you to a room that has not yet decided whether to listen. Almost every executive bio in circulation is a CV with the bullet points taken out, which is why almost none of them work.
A different artefact, with different readers
A CV persuades one person making a hiring decision, with evidence stacked for scanning. A bio persuades a room deciding whether you are worth the next forty minutes of their attention, and it does that through sentences. The two documents share facts and share nothing else — not voice, not structure, not the density of figures they can carry.
It also outlives the CV by years. A CV goes to a handful of recipients and stops. A bio is published: on a conference site, in a board pack, on a leadership page, in an award citation. It gets copied by people who will not check with you first, and it will be quoted back at you long after the role it describes has ended.
The spoken introduction. A moderator reads your first two sentences aloud, at speed, from a printed sheet they saw ninety seconds earlier. Write those two so they survive that treatment.
Board and nominations packs. Yours sits beside eight others in identical formatting, read for governance fit: sector, tenure, committee exposure, other seats, independence.
Company websites and investor materials, read by customers, analysts and journalists — one of whom will quote a clause back at you in a year, so every clause has to remain true in a year.
Award, editorial and speaker submissions, where word limits are enforced. A bio that exists only at 400 words gets cut by a stranger, badly, twenty minutes before the session.
Three lengths, written once
Write the 250-word version first, then cut twice. Cutting is faster than expanding and keeps the three consistent, which matters because they end up on the same screen as each other more often than you would expect.
Fifty words: name, current role and organisation, the one fact that makes you worth introducing, one other affiliation. One sentence, occasionally two. This is the version that gets used most often.
One hundred words: the same, plus the arc — what you have run, at what scale, and one before-and-after that a general audience can follow without industry vocabulary.
Two hundred and fifty words: adds earlier career in two sentences, board and advisory seats, qualifications, and one line that is not professional. A book, a boat, a school governorship. It is the only document in the set where that line belongs.
The first sentence carries identity: role, organisation, scale. Not “is a passionate leader”. Someone who stops after sentence one should still know what you are.
Third person throughout. Full name at first mention, then one form consistently. Alternating between “Priya” and “Ms Sharma” inside a paragraph reads as two documents stitched together.
Revise the time-sensitive clauses twice a year. “Currently leading”, “recently appointed” and “over 20 years” all decay quietly, and stale copies keep circulating in files you cannot reach.
Where executive bios fail
All three failures come from writing the bio in the wrong voice — treating it as a compression problem when it is a narrative one. The test is simple and unforgiving: read it aloud, standing up, at the pace a stranger would use. Anything you stumble over will be stumbled over in public.
The CV in prose. Six achievements with figures, joined by semicolons. It cannot be spoken, and a moderator will abandon it after the second clause and improvise something considerably worse than what you wrote.
The abstraction. “A visionary leader passionate about building people-first cultures.” True of thousands, memorable to nobody, and impossible to introduce a human being with. An audience given nothing concrete simply waits to find out whether you are worth listening to.
The one nobody updated. A bio still naming a role you left two years ago, sitting on a conference site that outranks everything else when somebody searches your name before a meeting.
Three lines, rewritten.
The same fact, made checkable. Every figure is illustrative of the shape an evidenced line takes — nothing here is invented on your behalf.
The claim on the left is not wrong. It is simply unreadable as evidence: nothing in it can be checked, compared or priced. The version on the right makes the same statement in a form a search partner can act on.
Rajiv Menon is a seasoned technology executive with over 25 years of experience across banking, insurance and consulting.
Rajiv Menon runs technology for a retail bank with 40 million customers, where he spent four years replacing a core banking platform that three earlier attempts had abandoned.
Anita Rao is a results-oriented leader with a proven track record of driving growth and transformation across global markets.
Anita Rao built the South-East Asian business of a European medical devices group from two markets to seven, and now sits on the board of the company that supplies its distributors.
With a career spanning three decades, Suresh Iyer has held senior leadership positions at several of India's largest manufacturers.
Suresh Iyer has commissioned eleven plants, nine in India and two in Vietnam, and closed three. He writes and speaks mainly about the three.