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Maybe it wasn't such a good idea after all. Procter & Gamble brass thought they had a right, based on an obscure Ohio law, to use local authorities in their hunt for corporate leaks. What they didn't foresee was that the company would come out looking so bad. After two insider-sourced stories saying P&G's food division was troubled appeared in the Wall Street Journal last June, P&G complained to Cincinnati police, who examined hundreds of thousands of local phone records to see who called the home and office of Alecia Swasy, who wrote the articles.

No one was prosecuted, but P&G found itself buried under a barrage of negative publicity -- so much so that last week P&G chairman Edwin Artzt circulated a letter to employees calling the situation an "embarrassing experience." P&G, he admitted, had "made an error in judgment" in pursuing police assistance and "triggered reactions that reflected negatively on the company." Said Artzt: "We created a problem larger than the one we were trying to solve." Still, he stressed the need to protect company information and asked employees to be "more diligent" in doing so.