William Agee, ’70s CEO whose star was dimmed, dies at 79

William Agee was 38 and a rising corporate star in 1976 when the Bendix Corp., a large auto-parts maker, made him one of the youngest chief executives of a major U.S. company.

Handsome and articulate, with an MBA from Harvard, Agee personified a new, more fast-moving, less bureaucratic management style that was starting to take hold. He got rid of Bendix’s boardroom table as a stodgy artifact of the past, banned executive parking spaces and often dressed in a style now known as business casual.

Three years after he took the reins at Bendix, Time magazine featured him in a cover article with the headline “Faces of the Future.”

He was personally appealing, and so was his message: Success at his company should be based on merit rather than seniority or tradition. He acted on that notion by recruiting and promoting young managers.

As it turned out, it was a recruiting decision — the hiring in spring 1979 of a bright, promising female employee named Mary Cunningham — and Agee’s subsequent handling of their relationship that largely defined his business career, touching off a national discussion about workplace behavior that reverberates today.

Agee died on Wednesday at the Swedish Hospital in Seattle. He was 79. His daughter Suzanne Agee said the cause was respiratory failure as a complication of scleroderma, a degenerative disease in which the immune system harms healthy tissue.