Covenant Medical Fair

Covenant Medical Fair 23-1-2011

A GREAT MAN IN SHOE BUSINESS, TOMAS J. BATA

Tomáš Baťa established the
organization in Zlín on 24 August
1894 with 800 Austrian gulden,
some $320, inherited from his
mother. His brother Antonín Baťa
and sister Anna were partners in
the startup firm T. & A. Bata Shoe
Company. Though the organization
was newly established, the family
had a long history of shoemaking,
spanning eight generations and
over three hundred years. This
heritage helped boost the
popularity of his new firm very
quickly. In 1904 Baťa worked on an
assembly line in the United States
and brought his acquaintance with
the method back to Zlín.[1] With
modern production and long
distance retailing, Baťa modernized
the shoemaking industry and the
company surged ahead in
production and profits right from its
nascent years.
Eventually, Tomas Baťa obtained
sole control over the company in
1908 after his brother Antonín Baťa
died from tuberculosis. After
Antonin's death, Tomas brought
into the company two of his
younger brothers, Jan and Bohus
into the business. World War I
created a booming demand for
military shoes, and the company
quickly became one of the major
contemporary footwear brands.
During the interwar period Tomas
Baťa again visited the New World to
observe progress at the River Rouge
Plant in Dearborn, Michigan. Upon
his return the company began to
look towards decentralizing
operations.[1] Baťa also exhibited
his business acumen, with his
initiatives towards producing low-
cost shoes for the general public,
whose purchasing power had been
significantly reduced in the
aftermath of the war. Factories and
companies were set up in other
countries including Poland,
Yugoslavia, India, the Netherlands,
Denmark, the United Kingdom and
the United States. These factories
were made self-sufficient and
autonomous in their design,
production and distribution
strategies, in a move to focus them
towards catering to the local
population.[1] By the early 1930s,
under Tomas Bata's leadership the
Baťa enterprise and Czechoslovakia
were the world's leading footwear
exporters. Tomas and his brother
Jan together were responsible for
the design of the Bata industrial
system.[citation needed]. Although
Tomas has been better promoted
for the development of the Bata
System, Jan's contributions were
equal to those of his brother Tomas.
For example, under Jan's
administration in Zlin, he developed
built more square meters of
buildings than under Tomas' time.
Czech Republic: 1. Zlin (Tomas and
Jan Bata)
Bata cities and factories built under
first ten years of Jan Antonin Bata's
administration below:
2. Otrokovice – Batov, Czech
(1930-1934), 3. Trebíc, Czech (1933),
4. Slovakia Bata Canal 60 Kilometers
(1935) 5. Nové Zámky (1935), 6. Zruc
nad Sázavou (1938), 7. Sezimovo
Ústí (1939)
Slovakia: 8. Bošany, Slovakia
(1931-1934) [factory and small
colony] 9. SVIT, Slovakia (1934) 10.
Liptovský sv. Mikuláš, (1938) [factory
and small colony] 11. Batovany
(today Partizánske, 1938)
Europe: 12. Best The Netherlands,
(1933-1934) 13. East Tilbury
(England, 1933-1934) 14. Hellocourt ,
France, (1933-1935) 15. Vernon,
France (1935) 16. Neuvic, Dordogne,
France (1939) 17. Belgium (1937) 18.
Borovo, Croatia (1931-1935) 19.
Möhlin, Switzerland (1933) 20.
Chelmek, Poland (1932) 21. Martfü,
Hungary (1941)
Outside Europe: India - In 1931,
Tomas Bata, the Czech shoe tycoon,
established his first Indian
operation at Konnagar. By 1936 the
Konnegar plan was phased out. In
May of 1931, Tomas sold his
business interests to his brother Jan
Antonin Bata who established
Batanagar, Bata's first permanent
shoe factory in India. The company
first established itself in India in
1931 by renting a building to start
an experimental shoe production
plant in Konnagar, West Bengal
with 75 Czech experts. It was Jan
Antonin Bata ’s administration that
designed, developed and built the
industrial city called Batanagar in
1934. Jan Bata also build factories in
Digha near Patna, and elsewhere in
India, employing more than 7,000
people. Batanagar, under Jan Bata's
ideals became one of the bigger
suburban towns near Kolkata.
22. Batanagar (India 1934-1935) 23.
Belcamp, Maryland USA, (1936-1939)
24. Batawa, Canada (1938-1939),
founded by Jan Antonin Bata and
taken over by Tomas J. Bata.
Brazil: 25. Batatuba (1939) 26.
Mariapolis, Brazil (1941) 27.
Bataguassu (1953) 28. Nova
Andradina (1958) 29. Município de
Anaurilândia (1963) 30. Município
de Batayporã (1963)
Other Bata factories:
Boucherieth, Syria (1934) Iraq,
Baghdad, (1934) Klang, Malaya
(1935) Mansurieh (suburb of
Alexandria), Egypt (1936) Gwelo
formerly Rhodesia, later Modrat,
Zimbabwe, (1937) Indonesia (1938),
Peru, Lima (1939) Chile, Batafler
(1939) Java Island, Batavia Kalibata
(1939) Kenya, Nairobi/Limuru
(1939) India, Lahore (1939) Marocco,
Cassablanca (1939) Belgian Congo
(1940) Bolivia, Quillacollo (1940)
Senegal, Dakar French West Africa
(1940) Gautemala (1940) Haiti, Port
au Prince (1940) Vietnam, Haiphong
(1940) Phillipines (1940) Bata
factory in Digha near Patna, India
Baťa was regarded as an
advocate of Taylorism,
functionalism[2] and a
proponent of many aspects
of the Garden city
movement.[1][3] Tomas
Bata is credited with
efforts to modernize his
hometown providing the
people with employment,
and housing facilities,
making him a very popular citizen
in the town. He also became the
mayor of Zlín. Tomas Baťa is also
widely regarded as a businessman
with an acute sense of social
consciousness. He is quoted by
many as one of the first pioneers of
employee welfare and social
advancement programs. Tomáš
Baťa stated:[4]
"Let's bear in mind that the chances
to multiply wealth are unlimited. All
people can become rich. There is an
error in our understandings - that
all people cannot become equally
rich. Wealth can not exist where the
people are busy with mutual
cheating, have no time for creating
values and wealth. It is remarkable
that we can find the greatest
number of wealthy tradesmen and
a population on a high standard of
living in countries with a high level
of business morality. On the other
hand, we can find poor tradesmen
and entrepreneurs and an
impoverished population in
countries with a low standard of
business morality. This is natural
because these people concentrate
on cheating one another instead of
trying to create value.
We are granting you the profit
share not because we feel a need to
give money to the people just out
of the goodness of the heart. No, we
are aiming at other goals by this
step. By this measure we want to
reach a further decrease of
production costs. We want to reach
the situation that the shoes are
cheaper and workers earn even
more. We think that our products
are still too expensive and worker's
salary too low."
Subsequent history of the company
Tomáš Baťa died in a plane crash
(Junkers J13 D1608) in 1932 near the
Zlín airport, trying to fly to Möhlin in
Switzerland on a business trip
under bad weather conditions
(dense local fog). After his demise,
his half-brother Jan Antonín Baťa
took over ownership of the Bata
companies and eventually fled to
the United States due to the Nazi
occupation in 1939, and later settled
in Brazil. Tomas' son Thomas J. Bata
anticipating the second world war
along with over 100 families from
Czeckoslovakia moved to Canada in
1939 to develop the Bata Shoe
Company of Canada centered in a
town that still bears his name,
Batawa, Ontario. The Second World
war saw many Bata businesses in
Europe and the Far East destroyed.
After the Second World War, the
core business enterprise in
Czechoslovakia and other major
enterprises in Central and Eastern
Europe were nationalized by the
Communist governments. Thomas
devoted himself to the rebuilding
and growth of the Bata Shoe
Organization together with his wife
and partner Sonja. He successfully
spearheaded ethical and innovative
expansion into new markets
throughout Asia, the Middle East,
Africa and Latin America. Under his
leadership the Bata Shoe
Organization experienced
unprecedented growth and became
the world's largest manufacturer
and marketer of footwear selling
over 300 million pairs of shoes each
year and employing over 80,000
people.
Baťa's leadership for quality and
innovation
In a scholarly study of Tomáš Baťa
as a leader and business innovator
Dr. Myron Tribus states:
When I first began this paper, I
intended to demonstrate that what
Baťa did is a superb illustration of
what is now called "quality
management". The record shows
that Tomáš Baťa did indeed
precede modern "quality
management" practices by at least
half a century. If we look only at
that side of the man, we must
conclude that he was the first to use
quality as a way to lower cost at the
same time as he created customer
delight.
However, as I delved more deeply
into Baťa's management methods,
it became clear that looking at his
work through such a lens gives
much too narrow a focus. It is
possible, of course, to analyze
Baťa 's work as an example of what
W. Edwards Deming has called his
"System of Profound Knowledge".
However, the level of abstraction at
which Dr. Deming describes this
system makes it capable of
encompassing many different
activities and while it provides
great generality, it does not provide
a focus on what was unique about
Baťa . I have chosen a less abstract
approach, concentrating on the
Baťa contributions I thought would
be of greatest value in
contemporary management. My
objective is to find the most
important lessons that the Baťa
system of management can teach
today's entrepreneurs.[5]
Wages scheme
Tomáš Baťa used 4 basic types of
wages:
Fixed rate - paid to a technical-
operative and an administrative
staff
Individual order based rate - paid
out to some manufacture specialists
Collective task rate - defined for
manufacture labour
Profit contribution rate - received
by operational managers
Also typical is so called "Baťa price"
used to give a price ended almost
always by number nine. Basically
meaning that a price 99 or 19.99
looks apparently much better than
rounded number such as 100 or 20,
even though the difference is just 1
currency unit.
Aviation
For Tomáš Baťa aviation was
another branch of activity - his
company was apparently the
world's first one to regularly use
aircraft for expedient transport of
not only high-echelon staff, but in
case of need also e.g. skilled
workers to places where their skills
were needed soon - so the primary
aim was the timely deployment of
manpower to the spot where it was
needed, not creating luxurious
"royal barges" for a few chosen. His
brother Jan A. Bata founded the
famous Zlin aircraft works two
years after Tomáš Baťa's death,
starting with simple gliders, but
offering, in the thirties to the eve of
the WWII, several sophisticated
types (e.g. the powered Zlin Z-XII,
widely exported, and the Z-XIII, as
well as some successful sailplanes)
and even aero engines. The
Moravan - Zlin factory is the direct
descendant of Jan Bata's Czech
aviation legacy.
In fiction
Novel Botostroj, 1933 (The Shoe-
Machine) by Svatopluk Turek a
communist writer portrayed Tomáš
Baťa as a strong willed dictator who
sacrificed himself and all people
around for success of the company.
After being published, Jan Bata,
sued for defamation and tried to
stop further publishing. In 1954,
Turek's novel was turned into a
movie of the same name, made by
director K.M. Walló.