“A lot of companies have nice-sounding cultural values like integrity, respect, and excellence, but if those values don’t map to specific behaviors, then they quickly get lost. Instead, we see what’s called a ‘halo effect’ where leaders tend to overvalue certain attributes and undervalue others.”
― Peggy Johnson
“Wireless is the largest information, communication, and technology platform in history, and mobile broadband is transforming how we can deliver educational materials and experiences to all students. The technology now exists to support learning on a massive scale and advance the 21st century skills needed to compete in the global economy.”
― Peggy Johnson
“I just feel like you should be able to have a respectful work environment, because if you do, you’ll be your best self.”
― Peggy Johnson
“It’s not just about checking the box on corporate social responsibility. It’s about hitting our bottom line.”
― Peggy Johnson
“When a culture is broken, the cracks show – morale is weakened, but so is profit and performance. That’s why culture has to be at the core of any business transformation.”
― Peggy Johnson
“Apparently, my grandfather left from Cork to America without saying goodbye to his mother! The family in Longford is still not happy about that.”
― Peggy Johnson
“Wireless technology is creating entrepreneurship on a small scale that allows a single woman to set up a business in a small village or a single farmer or fisherman to access and disseminate market information in order to get the best price for their products.”
― Peggy Johnson
“I’m an electrical engineer, and when I first started out, there was nobody who looked like me out there. I worked at Qualcomm, and I remember coming into meeting rooms, and I could never get the floor. I could never get my opinion across.”
― Peggy Johnson
“Business development is a part of M&A – we identify signals in the market, whether its trends or disruptive technology, and bring them back and address the opportunities. I have three levers I can pull – partnerships, acquisitions, or investments.”
― Peggy Johnson
“As a college freshman with an on-campus job, I was delivering paperwork to the engineering department one day. There, I encountered two department assistants whose faces lit up with the hope that I was a prospective student. I hadn’t come there to enroll, but their reactions piqued my interest.”
― Peggy Johnson
“I think our Acompli acquisition was an interesting one, which started with a partnership and looking at their mobile e-mail app on iOS and Android. And what I would like to highlight with that one is the speed that we actually turned that around and brought it out the door.”
― Peggy Johnson
“It’s a balance – sometimes you have to concentrate on your home life, and sometimes you have to concentrate on your work life.”
― Peggy Johnson
“As our smartphone becomes even smarter, mobile technology should actually take the burden out of our daily lives.”
― Peggy Johnson
“It’s up to you to define your own brand of leadership and your own version of success.”
― Peggy Johnson
“Very early in my career, I thought I had to conform to one style of leadership – lead by being the loudest one in the room, with the sharpest elbows.”
― Peggy Johnson
“Acompli is just a great example of a fabulous app.”
― Peggy Johnson
“If a company has a navigation system or a database or a virtual assistant they like better, Microsoft will meet them in the middle.”
― Peggy Johnson
“The industry trend is that everything is moving to the cloud, and most of our customers are in this very heterogeneous world.”
― Peggy Johnson
“Together with Adobe, we’re committed to fostering creativity and a culture of teamwork for our shared customers so they can unlock the opportunities of today’s rapidly evolving workplace.”
― Peggy Johnson
“I would try to be super-assertive in meetings and, you know, pound my hand off the table, and it never ended well. People would say, ‘What are you beating the table for?’ It’s not natural for me.”
― Peggy Johnson
“As the world continues its love affair with smartphones and tablets, mobile has become so essential to our lives that most people couldn’t imagine life without it.”
― Peggy Johnson
“I had to find my own terms for success, and it wasn’t anything like what I was told to do.”
― Peggy Johnson
“I can still hear my mom’s voice echoing through the house, reminding me and my siblings to ‘Make your beds!’ It seems like such a small thing, but when you’re one of 15 brothers and sisters like me, those small reminders about the importance of discipline and order are critical.”
― Peggy Johnson
“Great things happen when you converge services and devices.”
― Peggy Johnson
“’Rather than fighting over a piece of the pie, can we grow the pie?’ is really our model.”
― Peggy Johnson
“When text messaging first came out, you could only text within your network, whatever operator you had. It seems silly now, but once those walls came down, all sorts of applications and services were built on top of that. It ended up being good for everybody.”
― Peggy Johnson
“I spend a lot of time in the Valley. I’m probably down there every other week or so.”
― Peggy Johnson
“Cyanogen has done an interesting job with their version of Android – the Cyanogenmod. And they’re on 50-million-plus devices. And that’s just another ecosystem that we wanted to tap into and to bring our Office apps to.”
― Peggy Johnson
“We fully recognized that our customers have a variety of devices. They’re carrying all sorts of things. And we want to bring our world-class apps to those devices.”
― Peggy Johnson
“I worked on anti-submarine warfare for surface ships.”
― Peggy Johnson
“Once I was able to be my more authentic self, I felt like that’s when my career really took off. I was just my own voice.”
― Peggy Johnson
“My parents had two rules: You had to go to college, and you had to pay for it yourself. So we all did.”
― Peggy Johnson
“I grew up in a big, blended Irish Catholic family just outside of Los Angeles.”
― Peggy Johnson
“The 14th of 15 kids, I was the second youngest – not a coveted spot on the family totem pole.”
― Peggy Johnson
“I spent almost 25 years at Qualcomm before joining Microsoft, so in a sense, I grew up at one company. During that time, I made a very big shift from the engineering side to the business side.”
― Peggy Johnson
“At many companies, business development is treated as a sales tool for incremental growth, but I believe that business development can bend our growth curve in a big way. It should accelerate our ability to grow, helping us quickly close gaps or leap ahead of competitors.”
― Peggy Johnson
“Deals are always a bit lumpy. We look at, ‘Is it solving a problem for us?’ And if it does, we move to acquisition.”
― Peggy Johnson
“M&A at Microsoft is a team sport for the senior leadership group. They’re all involved in it, and we all play different roles. My role is the first centralized business development role at Microsoft.”
― Peggy Johnson
“Valuations are always much-debated. I try to center on what is the value to us. Is it solving a problems for us? If it is, we find a way to proceed. If the valuation has been overhyped on something and it doesn’t make sense, we won’t. It’s very simple for me. I tend not to worry too much about the valuation. It’s really what the value is to us.”
― Peggy Johnson
“When you dig in, two big titans clashing, what good is that? It’s not good for either of us; it’s not good for the industry.”
― Peggy Johnson
“Do one thing well, and then build from there.”
― Peggy Johnson
“Really, we don’t look at deals as ‘big’ or ‘small’: we look at things that will solve a problem for us.”
― Peggy Johnson
“Women themselves are an emerging market.”
― Peggy Johnson
“We all have to think about the emerging markets.”
― Peggy Johnson
“The opportunity to build new and surprising partnerships to help Microsoft succeed in a mobile-first, cloud-first world is truly exciting, and I look forward to leading these efforts.”
― Peggy Johnson
“There are more and more women entering into the workforce themselves. More and more of them are making more money.”
― Peggy Johnson
“To young professionals – and particularly women – looking to advance, it is imperative to keep your life in balance.”
― Peggy Johnson
“I attended a high school with more than 4,000 students and met with a guidance counselor only once during my four-year stint. Despite my clear strengths in science and math, my counselor’s advice was to pursue a degree in business. A career in engineering was never encouraged nor, in fact, ever mentioned.”
― Peggy Johnson
“You don’t have to fit into a mold that someone else has defined.”
― Peggy Johnson
“Qualcomm has seen firsthand the transformative power of mobile technology as part of many projects created through its Wireless Reach initiative – programs around the world that help educators, health care workers, and entrepreneurs take advantage of mobile technology.”
― Peggy Johnson
“In Indonesia, Qualcomm, in a joint project with Grameen Foundation, has provided a range of mobile phone-based services to individuals. This project facilitates the creation of businesses for those living at the bottom of the economic pyramid and, at the same time, extends telecommunication access to people who cannot afford a mobile phone.”
― Peggy Johnson
“More and more of the world’s population is gaining access to the same kind of computing power and connectivity that has transformed daily life for developed nations.”
― Peggy Johnson
“I envision a world where our smartphone is central to our lives in a non-obtrusive and intelligent way.”
― Peggy Johnson
“Our smartphones can offer innovative opportunities for improving how we react to our environment, and I believe it is increasingly becoming an asset – not a hindrance – to maintaining a healthier relationship with our work, our friends, and the world around us.”
― Peggy Johnson
“As more and more of our world becomes part of the wireless network, I see the mobile phone becoming a central command station for everything around us.”
― Peggy Johnson
“Access to the Internet is an essential tool for equipping students with 21st century skills.”
― Peggy Johnson
“The proliferation of mobile broadband networks combined with local area hot spots is bringing the dream of seamless and ubiquitous connectivity closer to reality.”
― Peggy Johnson
“Over the course of my career as an engineer-turned-tech evangelist, I’ve had the privilege of travelling the world and seeing the extraordinary impact of mobile on people and communities across a broad range of cultures and socio-economic strata. In many ways, mobile is a democratizing force. It empowers us. It inspires us. It extends our reach.”
― Peggy Johnson
“Culture used to be viewed as the ‘touchy-feely’ side of business, but that’s no longer the case. If you don’t have a defined culture behind you, then you aren’t going to be effective at executing your strategy.”
― Peggy Johnson
“A culture that only recognizes and rewards the same set of attributes results in less collaboration, creativity, and innovation. If we only reward the loudest voices or the sharpest elbows, then we’re missing out on the full range of talent.”
― Peggy Johnson
“At Microsoft, we know first-hand how passionate entrepreneurs can change the world. We believe that technology can empower everyone to achieve more.”
― Peggy Johnson
“We want to ensure that as a user is moving through their world, their data is following them in an appropriate manner.”
― Peggy Johnson
“We look for partners who are solving a problem for us. If they’ve already solved it, we’d much rather try to partner with them than try to rebuild it.”
― Peggy Johnson
“Gaming provides us with some very good signals about consumers and what they’re interested in.”
― Peggy Johnson
“Microsoft is a much bigger company than Qualcomm – a much bigger company – and there were a few days where I thought, ‘I don’t know if I can do this. It’s huge.’ My job was to come into the company and grow new businesses, and I thought, ‘I’m not sure,’ but it’s all worked out pretty well.”
― Peggy Johnson
“I focus a fair amount of my time on ensuring that we have a good funnel of females coming into the company and then that we’re retaining that as well and making sure that we have comfortable environments for them to be successful in.”
― Peggy Johnson
“If some day you’re struggling with math, and you think, ‘I don’t think I can do this,’ you can – you actually can. Everybody has their hard days – I definitely had mine – and you get through them, and you learn from that stumble, and then you’re onto the next problem.”
― Peggy Johnson
“If an acquisition can speed a process or fill a gap, we’ll jump right to that. It’s about timing, need… it’s not necessarily an algorithm.”
― Peggy Johnson
“We try not to look at everything through a competitive lens.”
― Peggy Johnson
“We are constantly scanning for opportunities.”
― Peggy Johnson
“We have such a huge demand for engineers in this country, both male and female. We need to find a way to do a better sales job on these young girls so we can get them interested in a field that is very rewarding.”
― Peggy Johnson
“I think there really needs to be a culture change because young girls are very interested in math and science, but somewhere along the way, they veer off of that.”
― Peggy Johnson
“You’re sitting in the car for many, many minutes a day. Can that be part of your new office? Can it be your new desk, a place where you actually get work done? We believe it can.”
― Peggy Johnson
“Live Nation is one of the most unique, exciting companies in the world and has remained at the forefront of the live entertainment industry by continuing to innovate and bring live entertainment to more fans around the globe.”
― Peggy Johnson
“We’re thrilled that our partnership with Adobe has now grown to span our three clouds – Microsoft Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics 365 – providing customers with the powerful integrations they need to navigate digital transformation.”
― Peggy Johnson
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