Why this $4bn CEO deliberately leaves his laptop at home

The rules of the 'laptop detox' test are simple. “Show up in the office for a couple of days without your laptop,” Qualys CEO Sumedh Thakar explains to me. The company is a Silicon Valley-based cybersecurity firm with more than 2,600 employees, currently valued at close to $4bn on Nasdaq.

“Without your laptop, you soon will realise where the gaps are in your organisation,” Thakar continues. "You may realise you have not hired the people you need to hire or that the people you hired are not creating the outcomes you wanted, so you have been sitting behind a laptop compensating for them.”

Thakar became CEO in 2021 but has been at Qualys for 23 years, with a background on the front line of software engineering.

“As a leader, I feel my time is best spent when I am articulating my vision to my key stakeholders, which are my employees, my customers and investors. The laptop detox is a way of showing myself that I’m building a team that is going to get the job done, rather than me compensating for that.”

Thakar’s advice perhaps reflects that he is a hands-on, technical leader, even though he didn’t found the cybersecurity company (which started out in 1999).

The ‘laptop detox’ is a good experiment for CEOs to try, reckons Kate Davis, an executive coach, board advisor and expert on organisational design in scaling businesses.

“Founders are struggling all the time trying to get out of the weeds in the business,” she explains, “with information being pummelled at them! In a founder-led business in particular, you can be attached to your laptop, as part of your (very involved) pattern of behaviour, because the business is still your baby.”

This phenomenon can limit both the leader’s impact and the ability of the business to grow.

“It means you never have the objectivity to look up and look around,” adds Davis. “You have to be more like a meerkat, to see the opportunities that lie ahead at long range.”

This laptop detox trick might be able to help you do just that.