Word: bendix
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...post-mortems dissect last year's Bendix takeover fiasco
...intellectually sterile managers? Will William Agee and Mary Cunningham ever find true happiness? Is the Harvard Business School encouraging its graduates to sacrifice real growth for mere asset management? The answers to the above are yes, perhaps and possibly. At least, so say two new post-mortems on the Bendix saga, Three Plus One Equals Billions, by Allan Sloan (Arbor House; $15.95), and Till Death Do Us Part, by Hope Lampert (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich...
...America knows generally what Sloan, a writer for the Time Inc. monthly magazine MONEY, and Lampert, a reporter for Newsweek, are writing about. Beginning last August, Bill Agee, the $900,000-a-year chairman of Bendix, tried to take over Martin Marietta. At his side as a powerful consultant was his new wife Mary Cunningham. At the time, Cunningham was not employed by Bendix, but two years earlier, as Agee's protégé, she had briefly served as vice president for strategic planning at Bendix. Agee grossly underestimated Martin Marietta's defenses. The company retaliated...
Mary Cunningham, 31, does not come off well either. In Sloan's account, she first appears as "the Queen of Bendix" and, after her marriage to Agee in June 1982, as "the First Lady of Bendix." Sloan begins by asking a sympathetic question: "Is corporate America ready for a high-powered, brilliant young person who happens to be female?" His answer is yes, probably, but it was not ready for Mary...
...ideas of others as her own. This had resulted in her being shunned by her first study group at Harvard. "By the end of the first year," writes Sloan, "people who had come to know her would no longer speak to her." People who worked with her at Bendix claim she took the expertise of colleagues and seems to have presented it to Agee as hers. As vice president of corporate and public relations, she would assign several writers to do a speech for Agee, choose the best version and, if he liked it, claim that she wrote it. Aside...