What the documented evidence supports is a more nuanced picture: Ball was an active executive who set the direction of her studio through the executives she hired and trusted, who made consequential decisions at key moments, and who sometimes made those decisions based on trust in her executives rather than detailed knowledge of the specific creative content involved.
Her decision to override the board on *Star Trek* was not a creative judgment in the sense of “I believe this science fiction show has tremendous artistic merit.” It was a corporate governance decision: I hired Solow to develop programming, the board is trying to cancel the most ambitious show he has committed the studio to, and I am going to back my executive’s judgment over the board’s financial conservatism.
This is itself a form of corporate vision. Ball understood that Desilu’s future was in developing ambitious new programming, that this would require absorbing financial risk, and that allowing a purely short-term financial calculus to override long-term programming strategy would undermine the studio’s creative purpose. She may not have understood what *Star Trek* was about in terms of its science fiction content. She understood what it meant for the studio’s direction.
The other documented instance of Ball’s direct involvement in *Star Trek* production — her sweep of a sound stage during the troubled production of the second pilot in July 1965 — illustrates a different dimension of her executive style. When production was running behind schedule, Ball arrived on the set and helped physically clean the stage to speed up the turnaround. This was not the behavior of a figurehead. It was the behavior of a person who had come up in the industry as a performer, who understood production logistics from direct experience, and who was willing to do whatever was needed to keep a troubled production on schedule.