The story of her sweeping the sound stage during the second pilot’s troubled production in July 1965 is told in the context of a schedule that had fallen behind and a production that was eating into Desilu’s budget. Ball’s response was to do what needed to be done. This is the behavior of someone who understood that production runs on the specific acts of specific people doing specific things, and that an executive with a broom is both literally useful and symbolically significant — a signal that the studio’s most visible representative considers no task beneath her.
This same quality — the willingness to act directly and concretely rather than managerially — is visible in the board override. The nod to Solow was not a carefully deliberated committee decision; it was a direct, immediate assertion of authority in the face of a contrary vote. Ball had the power; she used it without procedural elaboration.
The question of whether this represents good executive leadership or simply the exercise of unilateral authority is a fair one to raise. What the outcome suggests is that in this specific instance, the direct use of authority produced a better result than the institutionally correct outcome of the board vote would have. Whether this vindicates the leadership style or simply illustrates a particular lucky outcome is a question that reasonable people can disagree about.
What is clear is that the style was hers, that it reflected the specific person she was, and that the specific person she was produced the specific decision she made. A different head of Desilu — one more deferential to board process, one less willing to trust executive judgment over financial analysis, one who understood *Star Trek’s* content well enough to have additional doubts about it — might have made a different decision.