Soap Opera : The Inside Story of Procter & Gamble - Softcover

Swasy, Alecia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671897810 ISBN 13: 9780671897819

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1994

Synopsis

Behind Procter & Gamble's wholesome image is a control-obsessed company so paranoid that Wall Street analysts, employees, and the chairman himself refer to it as "the Kremlin." P&G's wealth and power ensure that it gets what it wants, from tax breaks to the eager services of Washington lobbyists.

In this explosive expose, Wall Street Journal reporter Alecia Swasy tells the chilling story of life within P&G.

Wonderfully readable, impeccably researched, Soap Opera is a sobering look at the price of success in American business.

About this title

About the Author

Swasy is a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal. She was responsible for the paper's coverage of Procter & Gamble for three years.

From Kirkus Reviews

Wall Street Journal reporter Swasy was, she tell us, spied upon, followed, and bugged while writing this admirable--if ultimately somewhat disappointing--history of the dark side of Ivory-soap and Tide manufacturer Proctor & Gamble. According to hundreds of interviews Swasy conducted with current and former P&G managers, contractors, and company watchdogs, P&G--a founder of the national brand name and a pillar of Cincinnati civic life since 1837--turns out to be a paranoid corporate strongman obsessed with controlling the lives of its employees and preserving the sacrosanct reputation of its brands. In chapters devoted, respectively, to the single-minded career of CEO Ed Artzt, to racism and sexism at headquarters, to totalitarian demands for worker loyalty, to hushed-up environmental debacles in P&G plants around the nation, and, finally, to the ruthless marketing here and abroad of brands--including Crest, Pampers, Tide, and, most notoriously, Rely tampons (which were responsible for a number of deaths in the toxic-shock syndrome scandal of the 1970's), Swasy thoroughly dismantles P&G's wholesome image. The documentation of various kinds of corporate malfeasance--including the well-publicized but still shocking episode in which P&G persuaded friendly local county law-enforcement officials secretly to search the private phone records of hundreds of P&G employees, looking for calls to Swasy's Pittsburgh phone after an unfavorable story by her appeared in The Wall Street Journal--is heroic. But the cumulative tale isn't shapely enough to stand on its own as a cautionary story, and Swasy is too close to it to ask what it tells us about corporate America today. For all Swasy's careful work, the book finally has a little ring of an author's rant. Must reading, however, for company watchers, P&G shareholders, curious consumers, and citizens of Cincinnati. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0671897810
• ISBN 13: 9780671897819
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 400