This is a true story of a successful business man brought down by arrogance and ignorance.

In the 1920’s the country of Brazil and Henry Ford made a deal. Brazil had lost its lucrative monopoly on rubber trees and Henry Ford needed to control his supply of rubber.

Brazil gave Fords 2.5 million acres of raw land in the Amazon jungle.  Ford, confident in his own ability to succeed, set about to create “Fordlandia”, an American town in the Amazon jungle. A town with seven schools, an ice plant and a fire department.  The supplies for this vision were shipped deep into the jungle, up a slow river, from Detroit.

Ford’s vision was to produce his own raw materials from his own rubber plantation.  A confident Ford proceeded without taking advice from agriculturalexperts and, motivatedperhaps by a bit of greed, planted the trees too close together inviting the bugs and disease that would plague his efforts for years.

Implementing western ideas of management, Ford paid his workers well but in the jungle paper money had little value. Without a cash economy to support the value of the pay, the workers were not motivated to stay on the job.

Ford’s arrogant insistence on reconstructing a mid-western American town in the jungle including, houses with sheet metal roofs instead of cooling thatch, time clocks and cafeteria style dinning met with violent opposition from the local workforce resulting in a conflict that that chased the management away down the river.

Ford’s reaction to this violent resistant was to double down on his vision of utopia introducing square dancing, movies, tennis, soccer and a golf course.  All amenities unfamiliar to, and unappreciated by native Brazilians.

Plagued by caterpillars, death and disease the plantation never produced enough rubber to supply Ford’s plants back in Detroit, but Ford did not give up.  In 1945 Ford left the control of Fordlandia to his grandson, Henry Ford, II.  The younger Ford wasted little time in selling the land back to the Brazilian government for $250K even though his grandfather had spent $20 million on the failed project.

The Moral of the Story

I hope for you all the success you can imagine but, when you succeed, do not ignore the principals, values and people that help you to prosper. If you do, you run the risk of finding yourself out of step with the changing reality of the world.

Photo by RodrigoCruzatti  [CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

Click here for more information about this failed project.