The CEO Took Credit for My Work.

The strategy was eleven weeks of work with a small probability attached to almost every line of it, which is what a strategy actually is once you take the adjectives out.

Ines had written it. She had written the model, the scenario table, the two-hundred-cell sensitivity sheet and the four pages of assumptions that made the whole thing honest. Her name was on the file metadata, in the footer of the draft, and nowhere on the deck.

The chief executive presented it on a Thursday to six investors, in the room with the long table, and did it well enough, because he had memorised the summary section the night before on the train.

Ines sat in the second row, where she had been placed, and watched a man she had never seen outside of an all-hands take credit for eleven weeks of her life with the confident, slightly bored delivery of somebody reading a weather report he did not believe.

“The scenario weighting is unusually conservative,” one of the investors said. “Who built the downside case?”

“That’s my team,” the chief executive said. “We’re very disciplined about conservatism.”

The investor kept looking at the deck. Then he turned to the appendix, which nobody ever turns to.