Peggy Johnson’s first job at Qualcomm required her to occasionally ride in big rigs to test satellite communications software. She’s now president of Qualcomm Internet Services. (photo/alandeckerphoto.com)

Peggy Johnson has always faced competition, from her childhood in Alhambra as second youngest in a family of 15 children to her studies at San Diego State University, where she was one of the few women in the school’s engineering department.

These days, Johnson, 44, competes on a global front as a key executive at Qualcomm Inc. She is leading a new effort to put live television on cellular telephone handsets, and also heads the software division that allows mobile phone users to play games, listen to music or send instant messages to their friends.

“She’s a pretty competitive person,” says her boss, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs. That competitive edge is tempered by an ability to laugh at herself and a knack for connecting with people, Jacobs says. “It doesn’t come across in a negative way. But you can tell she is very focused and very ambitious.”

Johnson wears two hats at Qualcomm, where she is an officer of the company and a member of the executive committee. She is president of Qualcomm Internet Services, overseeing operation of the company’s BREW platform, which allows applications from software developers to be run on many different manufacturers’ phones, and also ensures that participants are paid their fair share. She also is president of MediaFLO Technologies, which is building a system that will make an array of television programming available to cell phone users nationwide within the next year, and eventually to a global market.

She holds a couple of other important titles: wife to her husband, Eric, and mother to the couple’s three children, Jake, 7, Emily, 15, and Nicholas, 17.

When her work and family duties permit, she serves as a trustee at her kids’ school, on the board of the UCSD Cardiovascular Center, and is this year’s honorary chair of the YWCA Tribute to Women & Industry. The annual TWIN banquet will be held June 16 at the San Diego Convention Center. (Johnson is also a past TWIN honoree).

“It’s pretty amazing to look out at that audience of accomplished women,” Johnson says of the TWIN event.

Home Grown Talent

Johnson is a native Southern Californian, living with her family in Alhambra until she moved to San Diego to attend college. After her father died when she was a young child, her mother remarried. Her stepfather brought seven children to the marriage; when added to her mother’s eight kids, a family of 15 children was created. Johnson recalls mealtimes as lively events, attended not only by her family, but friends from the neighborhood.

All 15 kids went to college, she says, and they still see each other frequently. Growing up with so many siblings, she says, “allowed me to get along with just about every different kind of person.”

At SDSU, Johnson initially majored in business, and had an on-campus job delivering mail. One day, her rounds brought her to the engineering department, where two secretaries were overjoyed by the mistaken belief that she was enrolling in the program. When they found out she was merely making a delivery, they tried to sell the benefits of an engineering degree.

“They talked me into it basically, those two ladies,” says Johnson, and she switched majors the next week.

SDSU was also where she met her husband, at the time a graduate student who was teaching a summer electronics lab Johnson attended.

After graduating in 1985, she took an engineering job at General Electric, and landed at telecommunications startup Qualcomm in 1989. Her first job involved working with a satellite communications device for trucking companies. Her duties included occasional rides in big rigs to test the software, and she recalled climbing into the cab of an 18-wheeler when she was eight months pregnant.

Later, one of her managers noticed how comfortable she was dealing with customers, and urged her to try out the business side of the company. She resisted at first. However, her boss persisted and finally she agreed, swapping the engineer’s uniform of jeans and T-shirts for a business suit.

Since then, she has taken on increasing responsibilities at Qualcomm. In 2000, she was tapped to head QIS and the fledgling BREW program. In December, she was named president of MediaFLO Technologies.

Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs calls Peggy Johnson ‘very focused and very ambitious.’

“She’s just executed really well in terms of building relationships and getting deals done,” says Jacobs, adding that Johnson is probably Qualcomm’s best salesperson and a top-notch manager. Her breakthrough at Qualcomm came when she reached a deal with Nextel to use the company’s “push to talk” technology.

“She basically went all the way from starting the contract, negotiating and setting the tone in which the discussion could happen. All the way to getting the deal done,” Jacobs says.

While neither BREW nor MediaFLO bring in the same level of revenue as Qualcomm’s core businesses of chip sets and licensing, they help drive those businesses, Jacobs says. “There’s an impact on the core businesses that’s very powerful,” he says.

Johnson already is one of the company’s top executives, Jacobs says, and he hopes she will continue taking on new challenges.

“She can be one of the few people to drive the next new great initiative at Qualcomm,” he says.

Both QIS and MediaFLO Technologies are high-profile endeavors. This year’s annual BREW conference in San Diego attracted some 2,500 representatives of software developers, cellular operators, equipment manufacturers, analysts and media from around the world.

MediaFLO has generated a buzz in the industry, which included demonstrations at recent telecommunications conventions in Las Vegas. Qualcomm has partnered with Verizon to roll out the live television service to its subscribers, once the network is completed by the end of this year. Qualcomm is lining up content providers to supply the news, sports and entertainment that will beam into users’ cell phones as well as building the broadcast network, which will utilize UHF Channel 55 in cities across the U.S., so the television feed will not take up transmission capacity it says is better used for voice and data.

MediaFLO is one of three competing systems for delivery of television to cell phones that are under development, including one from Europe and another headed by Texas Instruments, says telecom industry analyst Andrew Seybold.

“MediaFLO, certainly from what I’ve seen, has the best of all the technologies. Qualcomm doesn’t do anything halfway,” says Seybold. “I think we’re going to find it’s going to be widely adopted around the world.”

The open question, Seybold says, is whether there is a demand for television on cell phones, and indications are that there is. In that case, he says, the industry will have to figure out exactly what consumers want, from full-length TV shows to music videos. A self-professed sports nut, Seybold said he wants to be notified when Barry Bonds breaks the major league home run record, and to see the actual feat on his handset.

As with the cell phone technology CDMA, Seybold says, Qualcomm is setting up the entire MediaFLO system, and will likely sell it off once it’s up and running. “They don’t want to be in the hardware business. They want to be in the chip set and intellectual property business,” he says.

Johnson sees big opportunities for MediaFLO. “Our intention is to introduce MediaFLO throughout the world. We think it’s the most effective way to deliver TV to a handset,” she says.

At The Office

Johnson is like a kid with a new toy as she shows off a prototype handset with a sharp, fluid image of CNBC in her Sorrento Mesa office, which overlooks the area’s rolling hills and canyons. Her secretary confesses that she likes to watch “Court TV,” with the handset discreetly held below the edge of her desk.

“It’s very compelling,” Johnson says. “We find when we bring them out in meetings, people start watching them. It’s very distracting. So that means it must be good.” In San Diego, the television signal is beamed from a transmitter on Black Mountain.

As she shepherds BREW and MediaFLO Technologies, Johnson travels internationally six to eight times each year, along with domestic trips. That’s a reduction from the one week each month she used to spend on the road.

Her husband, Eric, handles the domestic side of the family’s affairs, from bills to insurance to getting the kids back and forth to school from their home in Rancho Santa Fe.

“I let Peggy work. She doesn’t have to do anything but work, focus on her job,” says Eric, himself an electrical engineer. Since he sold his consulting business about a year ago, Eric says he has devoted himself to the couple’s home life and a new passion — flying. He has earned his pilot’s license, bought a plane and wants to take the family on aerial outings.

In spite of Peggy Johnson’s busy schedule, the family has dinner together every night she is in town, and she tries not to work on weekends.

“She’s not working as many hours, but she’s becoming more productive and more influential in the industry,” Eric says.

Eric is proud of his wife’s success, and believes her advancement in the telecommunications industry is due to her work ethic and her “extraordinary people skills.”

“She has all the tools necessary to be a CEO of a relatively large telecom company, there’s no doubt in my mind. But there’s no reason to leave Qualcomm at this point,” he says.

The couple enjoys keeping in shape. Peggy runs five times a week around Rancho Santa Fe and takes boxing lessons from a personal trainer. She also takes weekend walks with her friend and neighbor, Candace Humber.

When they meet at 7:30 a.m., Peggy Johnson has often been out running earlier, read the paper and maybe even done some Christmas shopping online. “And I’m barely awake,” Humber jokes.

Humber says she admires her friend’s ability to balance her work and family life, including attendance at school events. “A couple of times she’s had to break sonic speed records to get home, but she manages,” Humber says.

As she works toward a successful launch of MediaFLO and building on BREW’s successes, Johnson doesn’t see herself stepping back from the whirlwind of corporate life anytime soon.

“I don’t think I would be able to retire,” she says. “I enjoy working too much, and would miss the challenges it brings. I see myself continuing in this role, and would be happy with that, but would also welcome any new role or additional responsibility that came my way.”