François Locoh-Donou’s 2017 account of growing up in Togo and France links his leadership instincts to experiences far beyond the boardroom: coercive authority, racial exclusion, small-scale farming, and the responsibilities of building businesses at home. The title’s “new CEO” phrasing is historical. F5 appointed him president and CEO effective April 3, 2017; as of August 18, 2026, the company identifies him as its chairman, president, and CEO, with the chairmanship beginning in March 2026. (F5 appointment announcement; F5 biography)
The chicken-feed calculation that became a story about confidence
In a 2017 interview with GeekWire, Locoh-Donou recalled running a poultry farm in Togo with an engineering-trained partner. The farm grew to about 12,000 chickens, by his recollection. To reduce feed costs, he used linear programming in Excel to determine a mix of ingredients. His partner reportedly called the result “white man’s magic.”
Locoh-Donou told the story not as proof that Togolese farmers resisted technology, but as an example of how assumptions about where expertise comes from can persist. His partner was educated; the surprise was that a formal computational tool associated with Europe or the United States could be used to solve a local business problem. Locoh-Donou believed that challenging such assumptions—and treating technology as something people can create and adapt themselves—mattered to entrepreneurship.
Why his background mattered at F5
When GeekWire published its profile on August 11, 2017, Locoh-Donou had recently taken over F5 Networks. The company was facing a shift in the technology market from hardware toward cloud and software. His career had crossed engineering, sales, marketing, and operations, and he brought a perspective shaped by several countries and a business life that included ventures in Togo.
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Born to a Togolese father and French mother, he grew up in Togo and moved to France at 15 after his mother returned there following her divorce. He studied engineering in France, worked in research and development at Photonetics, then moved to the United States for a technology-transfer assignment in Boston. He joined Ciena after seeking a move from technical work into sales and a chance to remain in the U.S.; over roughly 18 years, he rose to chief operating officer. He holds engineering degrees from École Centrale de Marseille and Télécom ParisTech and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. (F5 biography; F5 appointment announcement)
A childhood remembered for play and enterprise
Locoh-Donou described his childhood in Togo as happy, not simply as a period of deprivation. He played football in the streets, kept chickens in the garden, sold eggs to neighbors, and imagined becoming an entrepreneur. He also dreamed of playing for Paris Saint-Germain. Leaving for France at 15 was painful; he recalled being devastated by the move.
That contrast matters. His story is not a simple claim that hardship produced a successful executive. It is about leaving a place he loved, adjusting to another culture, and carrying both early enterprise and a continuing connection to Togo into adult life. His father, whom the interview described as one of Togo’s first architects, also modeled building and investment: after studying architecture in France, he returned to Togo and continued projects, including a hotel that grew well beyond its initial plan.
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From coercive authority to employee empowerment
Locoh-Donou said he grew up under dictatorship and experienced management “by force”: power issuing commands because it could, rather than persuading people that a decision made sense. He connected that experience to his own preference as a leader for empowerment over coercion.
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In practical terms, the philosophy he described means giving employees context, room to exercise judgment, and less dependence on rank as a substitute for reasoning. This is his interpretation of how his early experience shaped him, not evidence that childhood alone determines a person’s management style or that empowerment answers every organizational challenge. It does, however, explain why he regarded autonomy and clear context as important leadership choices.
Belonging is more than representation
Locoh-Donou described moving between different experiences of being an outsider. In Togo, he said, people treated him as white because his mother was white. In France, he became more conscious of his African identity and said he encountered racial exclusion, with skin color, name, accent, or background marking him as someone who did not fully belong. In the United States, he said, he generally felt included despite his unfamiliar name and nationality. That is his personal account, not a universal judgment about any country.
He drew a distinction between having people from different backgrounds in an organization and making it possible for them to participate fully. In his view, inclusion means that employees need not pretend to be someone else, that their background is not treated as a deficit, and that they can contribute without continually managing other people’s assumptions. It turns inclusion from a headcount question into a question about everyday workplace conditions.
What businesses in Togo changed about money and responsibility
Locoh-Donou started a poultry farm in Togo in 1998 and co-founded Cajou Espoir, a cashew-processing business, in 2004, according to the company’s materials. Cajou Espoir describes a social mission centered on livelihoods and community projects. F5 reports that the enterprise employs several hundred people in rural Togo, mostly women; F5’s investor biography specifies that 80% of the workforce is women. These are company-reported figures. (Cajou Espoir profile; Cajou Espoir presentation; F5 investor biography)
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The underlying lesson was about perspective: a salary or business decision has consequences beyond the individual receiving it. Cajou Espoir’s stated combination of rural employment and community investment makes the business part of the story, not a charitable footnote. It illustrates the kind of locally rooted enterprise Locoh-Donou valued.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.His 2017 view of African technology and entrepreneurship
In the interview, Locoh-Donou pointed to Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Egypt as places where he saw innovation advancing, including mobile software, mobile payments, startups, and opportunities to leapfrog older infrastructure. He also argued that political freedom and economic conditions affect how innovation can grow. These were his observations in 2017, not a current ranking or a single assessment of a continent with many countries and different political and economic circumstances.
His broader point connected the chicken-feed story to entrepreneurship: people should not assume advanced tools or original ideas must arrive from somewhere else. Mobile technology can help businesses and communities build around local needs, but the interview does not establish that technology alone resolves structural barriers or that the same pattern applies everywhere.
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What the 2017 profile can—and cannot—say about leadership
The interview offers a coherent account of how Locoh-Donou says his life influenced his approach: exposure to coercive authority made him wary of management by force; experiences of exclusion made belonging an important test of inclusion; operating businesses in Togo gave him a sharper view of economic opportunity and obligation; and using analytical tools on a farm challenged assumptions about who innovates.
Those connections are valuable as a leader’s own explanation, not as a universal formula. The profile does not establish how an empowerment-based approach performs in every crisis or how one person’s experience represents Togo, France, the United States, or Africa. Its enduring interest lies in the specificity of the lessons—and in Locoh-Donou’s insistence that success remains connected to people and places beyond the executive office.
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