I recently listened to the Great Courses series of lectures, entitled Crashes and Crisis: Lessons form a History of Financial Disasters, hosted by Professor Connel Fullenkamp. Although the lecture series focused on economic disasters, I found many leadership lessons embedded in the lecture. In prior podcasts, host Richard Lummis and myself have considered the Dutch Tulip Bubble from the 1630s and the South Sea Bubble of 1720. Today we consider the leadership lessons and failures which led to the Mississippi Bubble of 1720.  The Mississippi Bubble has nothing to do with the state of Mississippi or the great river but rather a French trading company which had been granted an exclusive charter by the King of France to develop France’s territory in the Mississippi territory in the New World.

This lack of seeming awareness of enhanced risks, is a confounding aspect of this Bubble. If your own company policies, procedures, controls and personnel cannot determine how business is transacted in your organization, you run the risk of a legal violation or something similar to the fall of the Mississippi Company and John Law, who was forced to flee France disguised as a woman.

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