Mary Cunningham Agee

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Mary Cunningham Agee (born 1951 in Falmouth, Maine) is a former American business executive, author, entrepreneur, and philanthropist.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Mary Elizabeth Cunningham was born in Maine to Irish-American Catholic parents. Her father was a construction company executive. When she was five years old her parents separated. Her mother took her four children to Hanover, New Hampshire, where a cousin who was a Catholic priest, Rev. William Nolan, offered a safe haven.

Cunningham graduated from high school in 1969. She spent her freshman year at the College of the Sacred Heart in Newton, Massachusetts, and later transferred to Wellesley College in 1970. She graduated magna cum laude in 1973 with a Phi Beta Kappa key and a bachelor's degree in logic and philosophy.

She met her first husband, Howard "Bo" Gray, Jr., an American Express executive during a college mixer in her senior year. They divorced after six years. Years later, Mary would say the marriage sprang from "her youthful idealism".

She enrolled at the Harvard Business School in 1977, and earned an MBA in the spring of 1979. She declined the most well-paying job offers (32 in total) in New York City so she could work for a well-regarded CEO at Bendix in Michigan.

After considerable national publicity, she resigned in October 1980 after just 15 months at Bendix, and moved to Seagram's in New York City. She married William Agee in June 1982, the second marriage for both.

For many years she has been devoted to Catholic charities and causes, including the pro-life Nurturing Network (see [1]) since 1985.

Mary and William Agee live in northern California with their two children, Mary Alana and Will.

[edit] Bendix controversy

Shortly after graduating from Harvard Business School in 1979, Mary Cunningham went to work at Bendix as executive assistant to CEO William Agee. She was quickly promoted to a vice president's position, prompting office rumors and anonymous notes to the board of directors alleging an affair between Cunningham and Agee. It was an allegation both denied, although they subsequently married after Cunningham left Bendix.[1]

Some of the negative reaction to Cunningham from within the company came from managers who complained she had too much access to Agee and from other executives who disagreed with Cunningham's business analyses.[2] The firestorm of media attention about her alleged romantic relationship with Agee and her subsequent resignation from Bendix did not deter prospective new employers; she received more than 170 job offers.

In February 1981, she accepted an offer from Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, Inc., as vice president for strategic planning and project development.[3]

[edit] Popular culture

The war between Bendix, Martin Marietta, and Allied was the source of the buzz phrase "Pac-Man defense" (i.e., eat your opponent before he eats you).

[edit] References

  1. ^ "Mary Agee", usnews.com, February 20, 2005 (U.S. News and World Report print edition, February 28, 2005.)
  2. ^ Bendix Politics
  3. ^ "Mary Cunningham Redux", TIME, March 9, 1981.

[edit] Links

  • [2] - A managerial perspective

[edit] Sources