She took it.

Some of the board had reservations.

An engineer, they said, not a businessperson; a brilliant technical mind, perhaps, but did she have the presence, the polish, the — and here they reached for the word without quite finding it, because the word they wanted was showmanship, and they had just watched eighteen months of what showmanship cost.

I did not blame the board for their hesitation.

We are trained, all of us, to equate presence with capability, to trust the person who commands a room over the person who merely does the work, and that training runs deep and is reinforced daily.