Peggy Johnson Quotes

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.

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.

You don’t have to fit into a mold that someone else has defined.

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.

It’s up to you to define your own brand of leadership and your own version of success.

I spend a lot of time in the Valley. I’m probably down there every other week or so.

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.

We want to ensure that as a user is moving through their world, their data is following them in an appropriate manner.

Gaming provides us with some very good signals about consumers and what they’re interested in.

Do one thing well, and then build from there.

Women themselves are an emerging market.

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.

Acompli is just a great example of a fabulous app.

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.

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.

I grew up in a big, blended Irish Catholic family just outside of Los Angeles.

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.

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.

Great things happen when you converge services and devices.

It’s not just about checking the box on corporate social responsibility. It’s about hitting our bottom line.

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.

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.

The industry trend is that everything is moving to the cloud, and most of our customers are in this very heterogeneous world.

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.

It’s a balance – sometimes you have to concentrate on your home life, and sometimes you have to concentrate on your work life.

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.

I had to find my own terms for success, and it wasn’t anything like what I was told to do.

Really, we don’t look at deals as ‘big’ or ‘small’: we look at things that will solve a problem for us.

The 14th of 15 kids, I was the second youngest – not a coveted spot on the family totem pole.

‘Rather than fighting over a piece of the pie, can we grow the pie?’ is really our model.

Apparently, my grandfather left from Cork to America without saying goodbye to his mother! The family in Longford is still not happy about that.

If a company has a navigation system or a database or a virtual assistant they like better, Microsoft will meet them in the middle.

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.

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.

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.

The proliferation of mobile broadband networks combined with local area hot spots is bringing the dream of seamless and ubiquitous connectivity closer to reality.

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.

To young professionals – and particularly women – looking to advance, it is imperative to keep your life in balance.

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.

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.