The subtitle of this book should be "What We Didn't Learn From Building the Panama Canal, But Should Have". I think it is always easier to look back and identify mistakes. So not to be too harsh. But mistakes were made.
In 1927 Henry Ford, flush in the feeling that he was on top of the world, that he could solve any problem that came up in his professional life with a little ingenuity and a little generosity in the cash department. So when Winston Churchill announced monopolizing rubber to stave off plummeting prices, Ford responded with an idea of bringing rubber trees back to the Amazon in order to ensure his supply. He bought a plantation the size of Delaware and started hiring men to carry out his vision of "growing your own".
Which ended up being only a vision. Or a nightmare. As you might imagine, bringing a bunch of Norteamericanos into the deepest Amazon had some perils associated with it. Not the least of which was that they knew nothing about the ecology of the rain forest. Or about how to grow rubber trees. Somewhere in the midst of the first series of disasters they brought in some botanists and fungus-resistant root stock from the Firestone, which helped, but wasn't enough to stem the disaster.
What you would imagine to be problems were problems--the bugs, the heat, the unpredictable and very tropical weather, the lack of Western supplies, the prostitutes, the disease. Then when they realized they could do better with families than single men, there were all the problems associated with that--children filled the graveyards, there was inadequate food, medical attention and schools. Yet Ford persevered, and built a very Western style settlement, at great cost, which rotted almost as soon as it was finished.
One thing I did not know about him--he was adamant about treating his workers well--he paid them above average wages. He demanded and got loyalty, and it was successful for him for a very long time. His weakness was an inability to know when in fact he had made an error in judgement. But there was a lot about him that was remarkable.
One might point out that another weakness was that he was not a good person. He had a mutual admiration society with Hitler (and is the only American mentioned in Mein Kampf), published the scurrilous "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," and blamed violent outbreaks on the Jewish victims.
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