Word: sloan
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...affair gave Cunningham, Agee, investment bankers and just about everyone else who touched it a bad name. But Sloan contends the real blame lies with the values taught at the Harvard Business School, which awarded M.B.A.s to both Agee (1963) and Cunningham (1979). Sloan writes that the graduate school "does not teach how to build and operate a better mouse trap. It teaches how to outsmart, to beat out the other...
...Sloan offers some tidbits not widely known about Agee. Examples: he dropped out of Stanford after his freshman year with some Cs and a D in Spanish and was turned down by Harvard once before getting accepted. Sloan describes Agee, 45, as an aging boy wonder who is as goof prone as the next guy. The author points out that while Agee was chief financial officer of Boise Cascade, the company used questionable accounting methods in land acquisitions. Boise Cascade lost almost $300 million in 1971 and 1972, more than half its net worth at the time...
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...
Cunningham, says Sloan, had a history of appropriating the 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...
What about all that speculation about the relationship between Bill and Mary? Both parties denied that they were romantically involved while Cunningham was at Bendix, and whether they were or not, says Sloan, is "their own very private, personal business. The only reason it is an issue is that they have made it one." Sloan reports that Cunningham, intentionally or not, gave people at Bendix the idea that she was on familiar terms with Agee...