Agee to Fill Top Morrison Knudsen Posts
William M. Agee, whose fast-paced corporate career skidded to a halt when he led Bendix Corp. into a disastrous takeover battle in the early 1980s, has been named to head Morrison Knudsen Corp., a large engineering and construction firm.
Agee, 50, will return to corporate life in his hometown of Boise, Ida., to serve as the company’s chief executive and chairman, the latter a post that has been vacant for three years. He has served on Morrison Knudsen’s board for 11 years.
Morrison Knudsen stock rose $1.50 a share Friday to close at $43.50 on the New York Stock Exchange.
Described as both genuinely warm and quick on the trigger, Agee enjoyed an enviable rise up the corporate ladder only to be shaken from the top rungs amid a takeover fight for Martin Marietta and rumors of a sexual relationship with another executive.
Agee joined Boise Cascade in 1963 with a master’s of business administration from Harvard. He joined Bendix’s management team in 1971 and took over as chairman and chief executive in 1977.
Agee shifted Bendix’s emphasis from auto parts to electronics and aerospace systems and boosted annual sales toward the $5-billion mark. His compensation of about $1 million a year in salary--with stock options and deferred pay to match--helped make him an object of interest.
But Agee’s alienation of both colleagues and observers began when he hired and rapidly promoted Mary Cunningham, an MBA from his alma mater. Rumors of a romantic liaison with Agee forced Cunningham to resign from the vice presidency of strategic planning in 1980. Both have denied that they had a romantic relationship while she worked at Bendix.
Agee left Bendix after leading an unsuccessful takeover bid for Martin Marietta in 1982 that ended with Bendix instead being gobbled up by Allied Corp. (now Allied-Signal). He formed a small venture-capital and consulting firm in Massachusetts with Cunningham, who he had married in 1982.
At Morrison Knudsen, Agee is taking the reigns from William Deasy, 51, who will continue as president and return to the job of chief operating officer, a position he held before becoming chief executive. Morrison Knudsen’s management change, effective immediately, follows a six-month loss of $46.7 million, which resulted mainly from the divestiture of its real estate development segment and poor performance in its shipbuilding operation. Revenue for the first two quarters totaled $948.8 million. Morrison Knudsen has been further dogged in recent weeks by a federal review of its operations at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama and the Army’s Fort Drum complex in New York state. LOS ANGELES COUNTY
