Graham Taylor - Imperial Standard

A Book with Legs

Smead Capital Management

Investing, Business, Management

4.2 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 4 August 2025

⏱️ 77 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, author and professor Graham Taylor sits down with Cole Smead to discuss his book, “Imperial Standard: Imperial Oil, Exxon, and the Canadian Oil Industry from 1880.” Their conversation takes an in-depth look at the history of Canada’s Imperial Oil and its complex relationship with Exxon Mobil. Additionally, Cole and Graham discuss their expectations for the future of Imperial Oil, including if they foresee a time when the company is no longer controlled or majority owned by Exxon, and more!

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to A Book with Legs, a podcast presented by Smead Capital Management.
0:07.0	At Smead Capital Management, we advise investors who play the long game.
0:12.0	You can learn more at smedecap.com or by calling your financial advisor.
0:41.3	Welcome to a book with legs podcast. I'm Cole Smead, CEO and portfolio manager here at Smead Capital Management. At our firm, we are readers, and we believe in the power of books to help shape informed investors. In this podcast, we speak to great authors about their writings. The late great Charlie Munger prescribed using multiple mental models and analysis. We analyze their work through the lens of business, markets, and people.
0:46.3	In this episode, we are going to learn about another corporate history that transcends to teach us about the history of an industry, a country, regulation, and ultimately politics.
0:58.5	Graham Taylor is joining us to discuss his 2019 book, Imperial Standard, Imperial Oil, Exxon, and the Canadian oil industry from 1880.
1:08.8	A little bit background on Graham.
1:10.5	He is a professor emeritus in the Department
1:12.8	of History at Trent University. He is also the author of other titles, including The Rise of
1:18.4	Canadian Business and DuPont and the International Chemical Industry. He is the winner of the 2015
1:25.0	Petroleum History Society Best Article Prize as well.
1:29.3	Graham, I know there's more prizes that go with that, but I'm really glad you're here
1:32.4	with me. And thank you for joining me.
1:34.7	Glad to meet you.
1:35.8	Yeah, very good to visit. And so just to kind of start off, like, you know, you'd written,
1:39.8	you've written about DuPont, as I just mentioned a second ago. What drew you to want to particularly write about Imperial?
1:47.0	I think it's a very purposeful history.
1:49.7	I'm surprised that there's not more books out on it, to be honest.
1:53.3	But you have, you know, would I consider the most formative corporate history on the business?
1:58.3	Well, I guess two reasons.
2:01.0	One is that there aren't a lot of companies whose records,
2:09.9	whose archives are as large and as well preserved as Imperial Oil,
	...

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