My father was born in the early 1940s in a fishing village on the banks of Lake Togo in West Africa. He was fourth in a family of 16 children. There were no birth records at the time and so young children gained admission in first grade by lining up by height at the start of the school year. The tallest 60 children were granted admission and the next hundred were asked to try again the next year. Well, my father was not a very tall child. He was seven years old when he first lined up and he was rejected. The second year, he tried again. Rejected again. In the third year, his hunger to learn was so strong that when he was rejected again, he refused to leave the school until they gave him a spot. And so he finally entered first grade at the age of nine. And when he graduated from middle school a few years later, there were so few graduates at the time that he could have immediately been hired as a teacher and brought much needed income to his family. But he believed he was capable of more. And so he left his village to go attend the country's only public high school which was 300 miles away. A few years later he graduated from high school in the early 60s and surely then he could rest having achieved membership into a truly elite professional class. But he believed he was capable of more. He applied for and won a full scholarship from the Togolese government to go study architecture in France. Eight years later when he came back he was the first and only architect in Togo and work was plenty. But he wasn't done believing. He sought and won projects in Niger, in Nigeria, in Benin, in Ghana, in Ivory Coast and became a prominent architect not just in Togo, but across Africa. By the time I was old enough to understand things, my father had become this extraordinary figure in our family and indeed in our country. In our village, he was the main benefactor who brought electricity to the village, built a medical facility and even a church. In our extended family, he was the main provider. He was the health insurance and even the academic sponsor for most of my cousins. And believe me, when you have 15 uncles and aunts who all believe that having three or four kids is an underachievement, you end up with a lot of cousins. As a child growing up, I couldn't see any particular gift that my father had that his other 15 siblings did not. All I could see is his unshakable drive to push himself beyond what others expected of him. And so over time I came to understand that the reason that this boy who was too short for school had become the tallest pillar in our community was because he never accepted the ordinary achievements that the world offered him. Rather he pursued the extraordinary at all stages of his life. And so the greatest lesson I took from my father's life is the difference between ordinary achievement and an extraordinary life. And that difference comes down to one little word: extra. Because there is no way to know and touch extraordinary achievement without pursuing the extra in all manners of work and life. And so while my father remains in Togo, I knew I needed to make my own way. I needed to learn how to apply my own extra energies to build a life of my own design. And so I embarked on a quest to build that life and bring others along with me. With my soul made strong by the rich traditions, the beautiful voices and the lessons of the people I love so much, I faced one of the toughest decisions in my life, leaving home. And so began my 30-year journey across Europe and the United States. A journey that has allowed me to realize a dream far beyond that of a wide-eyed boy from Togo. That dream. Today I am the CEO of a Fortune 1000 publicly traded technology company called F5. Thank you. While F5 is a consequential force in technology, it is likely that many of you have never heard of the company or of me for that matter. We are a business-to-business company and so our work is behind the scenes. We secure and deliver the applications, the APIs that power your daily life. So, if you book tickets online, for example, to come to Houston this week, it is very likely that that transaction was delivered and secured by F5. If you checked your bank account balance recently on your favorite online banking application, that transaction was delivered and secured by F5. We are a midsize company of only 6,500 people, but we have an outsized impact on the world. And as such, we work with 23,000 customers across 170 countries. Our mission is to build a safer, a more secure, a better digital world. It's a worthy mission, one that gives me joy and purpose every single day. I am also on the board of a Fortune 100 publicly traded company called Capital One, which is the nation's sixth largest bank and one of America's top 100 companies to work for. And while I thrive on the intellectual challenge and the human impact that both Capital One and F5 have on the world, I carry with me a deep wound, a heartbreak that never goes away. You see, I am part of a devastating statistic. Within Fortune 1000 companies, it is estimated that there are less than 20 Black CEOs today. As of 2025, for Fortune 500 companies, there are only eight Black CEOs. And for publicly traded companies, the number of Black professionals that occupy board seats on publicly traded companies is less than 4%. To me, it is frustrating to see such a stark lack of diversity in the most powerful positions in our industry. And so recently I have reflected on the last three decades of my life. The trials, the painful failures, the lessons, the successes that have shaped my career in technology. And I have codified all these experiences into five lessons. I'm going to share with you these five lessons. I share them from my heart because I believe that by implementing them, you will make far fewer mistakes than I did. You will shine far brighter than I ever could. And together we can change these statistics. I will speak only about the things that I have done over and over again over my 30-year career in technology to stand out as a Black professional because as you already know, even when you're qualified, the world doesn't always open its doors to you when you're different. I call these lessons the five truths. Let me get started. Truth number one, you must make learning your obsession. Here's the brutal fact of reality. People have biases. And bias means you will never get the benefit of the doubt. After 30 years in this industry, I still don't get that benefit. Over time, I've learned to overcome this by unleashing my learning obsession. This means getting a PhD in your own job. It means aiming to learn as much in a year as others learn in five years. And it also means prioritizing the learning potential in your next role. If job B pays $20,000 less than job A, but job B has a higher learning potential, don't hesitate. Take job B. It also means that if you find yourself in a role with diminishing learning returns, now is the time to either reinvent that role or leave it altogether. The depth of your knowledge is something that no one can take away from you. Build that depth and make that a priority in your career decision-making. I first learned that lesson at a company called Ciena a long time ago. They make complex telecommunications networking equipment. And initially I was hired as a solutions engineer. But I knew very little about our core optical technology. And so I saw myself as having two jobs. Job number one was doing what I was paid for during the day. And job number two was learning, reading everything I could in the evening, at night, books, blogs, articles. I found experts in the company. I made them my private teachers. My goal was to become an indispensable expert. And because of this, not only did I avoid getting fired, but within a year, I had recovered from my imposter syndrome and I was tapped to become a manager of solutions engineers, my first promotion. To this day, I still dedicate several hours every week to increasing my depth in certain areas through books, blogs, articles, podcasts, human teachers, and even digital teachers. Now with AI. Truth number two, you must recognize and overprepare for your moments of truth. There are times in your life where in the space of 30 minutes to an hour, your entire career can be accelerated or set back. These are generally times where the stakes are high. Could be a big meeting, a quarterly business review, a project meeting, a client meeting. Any time where the stakes are high and people are going to see you in action. I call these moments of truth. How you show up in these moments is really how leaders build their perceptions of you. Over time, I've observed that most people prepare for these moments of truth just to pass. Meaning, they know the points they're going to make and they know enough not to be embarrassed. And that is a giant mistake. You must overprepare for your moment of truth. Meaning you must be ready to go 50 clicks in any direction about your topic. You have to overprepare in these moments by selfishly shutting out other tasks. The 20 hours you spend investing in a moment of truth will pay massive dividends relative to the 2,000 hours you spend in the next 12 months in your career. You should never aim to pass in a moment of truth. You should aim to blow people away because this is what accelerates one's career. My first big moment of truth was an executive offsite at Ciena with the future CEO and a number of executives who didn't know me. I was so scared about this meeting. I didn't sleep for a month. I studied our competitive markets. I went in depth on our technologies. I reviewed all the topics that were going to be discussed at the meeting. When the day finally came, I felt I was ready. And just before the meeting is about to start, I'm standing at the back of the room. I'm wearing my best and only suit, my best shoes that I had polished myself in the morning. I felt ready. And this executive comes to me and I'm feeling finally, you know, she has recognized me. I'm being seen. But no, she comes to me. She thinks I'm a hotel employee. She asked me to organize a run of coffee for the whole room. I was so shocked. I thought to myself, "Okay, my suit and shoes didn't do me right, but I'm going to show her what's up in a moment." And when my time finally came to present, my preparation showed. Someone would ask me, "Francois, do you think we can sell optical equipment in Mexico?" And the passing answer would have been, "Yes, they have three competitors and we have better technology." But no, no, no, no. I was prepared to go way deeper than that. I told them how many fiber miles there were in the country, what the size of the market was, who the local competitors were, what their pricing was, what margins we could expect. Because of that depth, my answers made their jaws drop. The future CEO of the company, who later became a mentor for me, and to this day still my mentor, on that day after the meeting told me something I never forgot. He came to me and said, "Francois, we should clone you." I felt 50 feet tall after he said that and after that meeting because in the space of 30 minutes the perception of me at Ciena had changed forever. And I hold that moment as a private victory over bias, the power of extra, and the power of preparing for your moment of truth. Now, truth number three only comes after one and two because it only works in that order. Once you have a proven obsession for learning and you have hopefully demonstrated that learning ability in many moments of truth, you have to be unapologetically ambitious. It is your time. Black people and actually most underrepresented groups are often not inclined to share their ambitions. We fear how our peers would perceive our ambitions. We don't have the social capital that others have. And frankly, we are rarely encouraged to be ambitious. But the reality is you will never get anything that you don't ask for. You have to take that extra step, that extra uncomfortable step to push yourself and share your ambition so the right people in your organization know that you want an opportunity and you want it now. Often times you'll see in organizations, I'm sure you have experienced this in your companies. Leaders want to keep you in the organization, but they don't want the hassle to create a bigger space for you. They have to know the risk of not promoting you. You have to create the tension that comes from them knowing you want an opportunity and you want it now. I've mentioned Ciena a few times. I spent 18 wonderful years there. In one of my first roles there, I was a manager of solutions engineers in Europe. And I knew that if I wanted to move into general management in the business-to-business part of the technology industry, I had to earn sales experience. And so when a job opened up for a country manager of sales in Germany, I went to see the head of Europe and I said, "I want that job." Let me tell you that he dismissed me immediately. He said, "You're not German. You don't speak German, and you've never sold anything. Other than that, you're greatly qualified. I would not even consider you for the job." I said, "All of those are true points, but I know our products better than anybody. I know our commercial offerings. I know our competitors, and I'm going to pour my life into this job. And by the way, if I am to stay at Ciena for the long term, this is the next step that my career requires." I created this tension that forced them to at least let me interview for the job. And you probably know the rest of that story. I was extra prepared for that moment of truth and I got the job. Now, it would take a lot more time together for me to share with you what actually happened in Germany, how brutally hard it was, the spectacular mistakes that I made. But over time, my learning obsession kicked in and I survived and this job changed the course of my career. You need to know the next step that your career requires. Take that extra uncomfortable step to share your ambitions and create the tension that will expand your career. So, I've mentioned to you that part of my quest to emulate my father's habit of doing the extra was to bring others along with me. Togo, the home of my childhood friends whom I'm still loving and still hang out with today, contends with generational poverty. And so leaving home to me felt like I was leaving them behind. And so over time, I have tried to empower not just people in the communities where I work and live, but also people in the community that raised me. And my best description of this comes from a quote from Nelson Mandela whose life choices have profoundly shaped my own views on leadership. And he said this, "What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others." And this brings me to the fourth of my five truths. Become a giving leader. It is a simple but profound shift from proving to giving. We have all been conditioned at home by our parents, in school, at work to prove ourselves. Prove that we can pass this exam, this test. Prove that we can solve this complex problem, deliver this project, meet this budget. Proving, proving, proving. But the reality is what you give and how much you give is what defines you as a leader. And so I encourage you to take your time to give, to listen to someone, to help them solve an intractable problem. Help someone see something in themselves they couldn't see in their own. When you give the best of your time and your skills and your wisdom and your encouragement to others in an organization, it creates followership around you. People want to work for you and work with you because you make a difference in their lives. If you're writing a to-do list on a weekly basis, add a giving section to your to-do list and define who you will give to and how. By way of a thank you note, a follow-up conversation, or public acknowledgement in a meeting. To this day, I still have a mental list of two to three people I want to give to. And every time I do it, it gives me energy. It gives me inspiration. Now, I've mentioned my life in Togo a few times. 20 years ago, my partner Maurice and I, we co-founded a company that has become the country's largest cashew processing factory. We call it Caschoir. Thank you. It stands for Cashews of Hope. At full capacity in our factories, we employ over 900 people, 70% of whom are women. Our mission is to try and reduce poverty in rural areas by creating employment opportunities that can translate to about $80 a month, which is quite special in a region where most people live with less than a third of that. One of the women in our factories is called Akouameba. Akouameba used to live about 100 miles away from our factory and she had heard of the jobs there, but she couldn't come. It took her 18 months to save the $10 she needed to make the trip to the factory just to apply for a job. When she got to the factory, she had to contend with more adversity. Akouameba was born with poor vision and so she was denied a job in our peeling section which requires delicate hands and strong vision. But she couldn't afford to go back. She insisted that we give her a job in the shelling section which is more physically demanding and is typically occupied by men. And so we decided to give her a chance. And after a while, something amazing happened. Akouameba's natural talent, her giving nature, her work ethics began to shine. She began to shine. She has become not just one of our best shellers, but she coaches others. She listens. She provides wisdom. She helps onboard new workers in the factory. Akouameba has no managerial responsibility. She has no leadership title. She was born with poor vision. She's a female worker amongst male workers. But all workers chose her as their leader because of her generosity. If you want to become a strong leader, you have to understand what Akouameba already knows: that managers in an organization are appointed from above but leaders are selected from below. Now I know at this point a number of you may be wondering, okay I can commit to doing the extra and understand that meaning making learning my obsession, overpreparing for my moment of truth, becoming unapologetically ambitious, sharing my ambitions, and becoming a giving leader. But what comes next? Well, what's next is far more personal. What next may mean doing something that is so far outside of what's comfortable that sleeplessness visits you for weeks. It may mean doing something so personal, so vulnerable that no one can save you if you fail. Or doing something that you will remember for the rest of your life like this moment for me standing right here sharing my story. As we approach our final moments together, allow me to share with you my fifth and final truth, a profound and permanent expression of extra. Share your story. Thank you. Share your story. You may underestimate the power of sharing your unique walk in the world so that someone who feels alone feels seen. Sharing what you had to do to get here so that others in the same fight feel joined. Or sharing your triumphs just like my private victories to help a brother or sister's dream feel possible. Impart your stories through self-publishing your writings, writing a blog on LinkedIn, volunteering to speak at a team event or company event. Otherwise, the world may interpret your silence, your stillness, your untold story as surrender, expecting little more from you than ordinary achievement. And we must never accept ordinary. You know, I look around this room and I see you. I see all these beautiful faces here. And I know we don't know each other personally, but I know for many of you, you are the first in your family to work in the technology industry. I know there are a number of you, you're the first in your family to graduate from college. And for all of you, all of us, the first in a generation of the diaspora to walk into rooms that were never designed for us and refuse to walk back out. Nothing about you is ordinary. You are the proof that your achievements do not need permission. You are the broad shoulders that others will stand on. And you honor the path of those who rose with far less. You reject the ordinary because you are extraordinary. Thank you very much. Thank you.
