She's not a lawyer or engineer, but Ruth Shaw was considered the best man for the job of restoring Duke Power's reputation.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: Duchess Power

Eleven years ago, they settled into a routine, meeting every few days for breakfast behind glass partitions of a restaurant in a downtown Charlotte hotel. He was a balding, somber-suited executive pushing 60. She might pass for a fortyish schoolteacher. He would push back his plate, assuming she had asked him every conceivable question. "Then she'd ask some more." They'd meet again, and he'd tell her more. Finally, she consented.

Ruth Shaw resigned as president of Central Piedmont, North Carolina's largest community college, to join Duke Power, the state's biggest utility. As vice president of communications, she would be in charge of lobbying and public relations, high-profile but relatively low-wattage roles in a company that supplied power to 2.1 million customers in the Piedmont Crescent, the Carolinas' industrial heartland, from upstate South Carolina to the Virginia border.

Outsiders clucked. Vice Chairman Bill Grigg, some figured, had wooed her into a dead-end job, putting a female face in the top tier of a company that had been run by hard-nosed lawyers and no-nonsense engineers since Buck Duke's tobacco fortune launched it in 1905. She would be a new girl the old boys could show off. But Grigg, soon to become chairman and CEO, saw more than a persona for the softer side of Duke. She was insightful, a good manager and, yes, tough. Persistent as a pit bull. "By the time she said yeah, she knew as much about the company as I did."

Monday morning, Jan. 13, his successor, Rick Priory, wraps up a news conference to warn analysts of more bad news -- 2002 earnings for Duke Energy Corp., created by the 1997 merger of Duke Power and Houston-based natural-gas distributor PanEnergy, are worse than expected -- and summons Shaw to his office. Waiting with him is Fred Fowler, his second in command. Congratulations, they tell her: You're the new president of Duke Power.

In the press release announcing her promotion, Priory calls her "an extraordinary business leader, with strengths in strategy, operations, management and customer and employee relations." But the release focuses on her community activities. "Ruth has distinguished herself and Duke Energy with excellence in civic and professional organizations." Just by gender, she is the unlikeliest president Duke Power has had. That alone might have some who preceded her spinning like turbines in their graves. However, she brings a set of skills to the job that none of them had but which the company -- all of Duke Energy -- needs to save its most valuable asset. No, not its nuclear plants nor its pipelines. Its reputation. Shaw was selected, insiders say, because she's a unique blend of velvet and steel: a charmer who can captivate and clam customers and investors, with the managerial mettle to generate power -- and profit -- at peak efficiency.

Shaw, 55, succeeded Bill Coley, 59, who left after 37 years with the company. Before his resignation became final Feb. 28, word emerged that a federal grand jury was probing accounting irregularities under his watch. Under investigation is $123 million in understated profits from 1998 through 2000. Last year, the company agreed to repay customers $25 million, chump change compared to Duke Power's $1.6 billion earnings before interest and taxes in 2002. The real damage comes from outside auditor Grant Thornton's conclusion that Duke had a "coordinated plan" to keep regulators from cutting rates. The errors, Shaw says, were unintentional.

Many people were still steamed by what they saw as a sluggish response to the December ice storm, when a record 1.4 million customers lost power. On the day she was anointed, 10-foot letters, painted by somebody who had gone eight days without power, were still visible on a residential street four miles from corporate headquarters: DLTKE POWER SUX. Some...