Soap Opera:: The Inside Story of Proctor & Gamble [Hardcover]

Alecia Swasy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 14, 1993

An experienced reporter investigates Procter & Gamble, the United States' thirteenth largest company, revealing painful facts about a control-obsessed corporation not afraid to bend the rules for its own benefit. 75,000 first printing. Major ad/promo. Tour.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this scathing account, Swasy, who covered Proctor & Gamble for three years for the Wall Street Journal , looks at a generally well-regarded corporation which--if the author is to be believed--has thrived on a combination of Nixonian political deviousness and brutality like that of the KGB. P&G, founded in 1837, manufactures such American commonplaces as Ivory soap, Tide, Crest, Crisco and Pampers. Exposing a corporate mindset which produces stilted, cookie-cutter executives, she traces many problems to CEO Ed Artzt, a workaholic whose hero is Attila the Hun. Swasy examines allegations that P&G continued to market Rely tampons in 1980 when they knew they caused toxic shock syndrome, resulting in several women's deaths. Other horror stories include the use of animals in lab tests; the firm's retaliation against those who protested its pollution of the Fenholloway River in Florida and discussion of P&G's involvement in the politics of El Salvador. Swasy also charges that P&G put her under surveillance and monitored her phone records. Sometimes the author seems to be grinding an axe, repeatedly using phases like "he felt he was being watched" without offering solid evidence. Although the thorough negativeness makes it hard to believe any corporation could be this devious, the book remains a chilling look at the corporation as Big Brother. BOMC and Fortune Book Club selections; author tour.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 378 pages
• Publisher: Crown; 1st edition (September 14, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812920600
• ISBN-13: 978-0812920604
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.8 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,713,026 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good Read, But She Missed Some of the Dirt, December 20, 2001

By 

Qatmom (Cincinnati, Ohio) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Soap Opera : The Inside Story of Procter & Gamble (Paperback)

I was a Proctoid for nearly 8 years and can personally confirm some of the stories Swasy relates.

The only weakness of the book is that she misses some of the dirt (the prostitution ring busted the same week as the drug ring at Sharon Woods Technical Center, for example) and some of the weaknesses of the company (low pay among technical people, driving out experienced people to bring in legions of temps with no loyalty to the company, and much more).

Procter isn't unique in its problems, but if they are not addressed honestly and in a timely fashion, in the long term, the company is in trouble. This 'elephant' does not dance, and they cannot go on buying good companies and running those brands into the ground while gutting research and innovation in-house.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Why people hate big business, December 11, 2003

By 

Bill Slocum (Norwalk, CT USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Soap Opera : The Inside Story of Procter & Gamble (Paperback)

"Soap Opera" recounts what one hopes to be, though perhaps optimistically, a particularly bad period in the history of one of America's largest corporations, Procter & Gamble in the '80s and early '90s, when led by succeeding CEOs John Smale and Ed Artzt, the company ran afoul of environmental laws, consumer safety, common sense, and basic human decency in truly arrogant fashion. To read the story comprehensively laid out by Alecia Swasy is to gape in astonishment at the true measure of human depravity in search of the holy buck.

Does Swasy have it in for P&G? Yeah, but so would you if you were a journalist and your subject was breaking the law to trample on your rights while you tried to do your job. Things got so out of hand as P&G launched telephone record investigations and had ex-employees brought to Cincinnati police stations to explain why they were talking to a reporter, that the ensuing coverage sparked a national outcry. Pundits and cartoonists weighed in about the KGB tactics of people who make laundry detergent and toothpaste. When finally brought to heel by indignant shareholders, CEO Artzt shrugged and called it a mistake. "The only thing he regretted," Swasy writes, "was getting caught."

Swasy was clearly embittered by her experience, and when her narrative flies into polemical flourishes, as in the Epilogue ("[Critics] refuse to buy the Ivory-pure image so carefully cultivated by P&G's years of marketing. We should all do the same"), the book is poorer for it. She does a great job describing, through the voices of mostly anonymous insiders, the noxious work environment of P&G for its employees (and you don't have to be a "Proctoid" to relate to the Dilbert-in-the-Death-Star picture she paints), then editorializes on how P&G advertising nurtures enduring cultural "myths" about a woman's place being in the home. Frankly, this latter angle comes up lame. P&G advertising reflected the culture for years, it sold product, and it has been adjusted to fit contemporary mores, as Swasy notes (just not enough for her liking.) I don't know whether it's so awful the role of the female was once rather more rigidly defined than it is now, but dumping much of the blame on P&G's doorstep seems excessive. Marketing to lesbian soccer Moms in the 1940s would probably have not helped P&G achieve its present level of success.

Where Swasy's book is strongest is the account of Rely, the tampon whose ingredients could cause toxic shock, and were directly responsible for the deaths of several women in 1979-80. Despite the accumulation of evidence, P&G went forward with its marketing. As recounted in a chapter of the book "Guerrilla Marketing") that should be required reading in corporate ethics classes, CEO Smale even planned to roll out a deodorant version of Rely while his underlings worked to silence researchers (mostly successfully) with generous grant money. The chapter is particularly good when it recounts how one trial lawyer and a bereaved husband he represented forced P&G to pay ridiculously low damages and put needed heat on the effort to establish P&G's culpability. Never mind, though. Swasy reveals later on that P&G's lab boys were concurrently doping out how to add the same toxic chemical to diapers.

There are other good chapters on P&G's arrogant practices overseas, its inept handling of domestic retailers (not just the small fry but WalMart, too!), and its stranglehold on a Florida community living around a river P&G polluted. Sometimes, as with the Florida case, Swasy seems too eager to embrace anything the critics dish out, and her noting the death of the P&G snack food Pringles [as of the book's publication in 1994] appears in retrospect to have been premature.

But overall, "Soap Opera" is a solid addition to business journalism. Books like this one only make you look a little deeper than your coupon stash in thinking about what products you buy. And that's a good thing.

11 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars why is this out-of-print? Did P&G buy up all of the copies?, May 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Soap Opera : The Inside Story of Procter & Gamble (Paperback)

Alecia Swasy excellently describes the terrifying authoritarian world of Proctor & Gamble. Needless to say, this book reads like a soap opera. Highly entertaining and informative!