How Did K.C. Irving Handle a Missing Oil Delivery?

Shane Parrish says K.C. Irving handled a missing oil delivery by answering the call himself and phoning back until the oil was in the house.

On a winter Sunday in New Brunswick, Canada, sometime in the 1960s, the telephone rang inside a big white house on Mount Pleasant Avenue and interrupted a meeting. Mulroney of St. Patrick Street had a cold house, an empty furnace, and a reasonable suspicion that someone at the oil company had forgotten him. He wanted somebody important to hear about it. Irving said he was sorry, mentioned the cold day, wrote down the address, hung up, and called the oil yard. He then called Mulroney back to say the truck was coming. About half an hour later he interrupted the meeting a second time and called again to confirm the oil had actually arrived.

Mulroney had reached the owner of a group of roughly 300 companies, including delivery trucks, the refinery, ships, forests, mills, and newspapers. One of the richest men in the country ran a complaints department out of his own home, staffed by himself, and he needed to know the problem was solved. Nearly a fifth of the gasoline America imports today flows out of his refinery. Canadians know the name well, and in the east of the country it is hard to drive more than 10 minutes without seeing it.