WSJ.com - In Line to Lead: "24. Yoon Song Yee
Vice President, SK Telecom

When Yoon Song Yee was 11 years old, her mother tried to enroll her in an art academy in Seoul. But the young Ms. Yoon, who had a passion for science, put her foot down, complaining: 'There are no labs in this school.'
That persistence has been paying off ever since. Her precocious talent earned Ms. Yoon an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from South Korea's elite science university at 21 and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology three years later.
Now 28, she is still rising fast -- in the corporate world. The highest-ranking woman executive at SK Telecom Co., South Korea's largest telecom service provider, Ms. Yoon is a vice president in charge of the company's communication-intelligence task force. The mission of the 33-member task force, which includes both technicians and marketers, is to create a new generation of mobile-phone services that can be tailored to the needs of individual customers. Among the innovations her task force is working on: mobile phones that keep track of a user's shopping habits and provide updates on the latest bargains and products.
In another project, her team is trying to design the next generation of networking tools to facilitate wireless Internet access via mobile phones. Specifically, her team is building on a service tested earlier by the company in which cartoon characters accept user commands and respond with information on everything from the weather to stock prices, theater times and the latest pop songs.
In her free time, Ms. Yoon paints landscapes and still lifes, an interest she acquired from her mother, a traditional calligrapher. 'Imagination is an essential part of both science and art,' she says. 'It is the unconventional thought that creates n"