Content area
Full Text
Rising Tide: Lessons from 165 Years of Brand Building at Procter and Gamble. By Davis Dyer, Frederick Dalzell, and Rowena Olegario. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004. x + 467 pp. Illustrations, photographs, tables, figures, bibliography, notes, index. Cloth, $29.95. ISBN: 1-591-39147-4.
Rising Tide, according to its authors, serves a dual purpose. The first is to provide an account of Procter and Gamble's evolution from local candle maker to global multinational, a topic that, they rightly claim, has received relatively little attention from academic business historians. The second purpose of the book is to "explain the company's success in its core business of building consumer brands" (p. vii). The authors are far more successful in achieving this second objective than in providing a corporate history of P&G.
They do clarify that the book was not meant to be a conventional corporate history, though it was an officially commissioned one. Access was granted to the P&G corporate archive, which is described as a "treasure trove of historical information and a model of its kind" (p. ix), and interviews were conducted with a host of senior and middle managers. If ever there was an opportunity to provide a definitive account of P&G's history, this was it. Judged purely as an academic company history, however, the book has a number of shortcomings.
First, and perhaps most disappointing, is the nature of the source material used. Despite having an archival "treasure trove" at their disposal, the authors have relied heavily on interviews to discover the internal workings...