Quotes from 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.

Deals are always a bit lumpy. We look at, 'Is it solving a problem for us?' And if it does, we move to acquisition.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Women themselves are an emerging market.

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.

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

We all have to think about the emerging markets.