The Right Way to Plug a Leak: The ability of corporations to find complicated and unethical ways of doing things they could do simply and ethically never ceases to amaze me.

Kent Perkins, partner at Los Angeles-based private investigation firm Diversified Risk Management, which specializes in corporate work, explains why what HP did in trying to trap a boardroom leaker was not only “extraordinary” and “not legitimate” but also incredibly dumb.

“He said there was a simple, legal way for H-P to handle the matter: The chairman should have hired a firm like his to address the board and ask directors to sign a form that released their personal phone records over the past 90 days. Perkins would have told directors that the company could not force them to comply, but failure to release the data would have signaled that they were unwilling to cooperate with a reasonable request by management. The chairman and CEO should have signed the release on the spot in a dramatic flourish.”