Tomáš Baťa

Tomáš Baťa (3 April 1876 in Zlín, Moravia – 12 July 1932) was a Czech entrepreneur, founder of the Bata Shoes company.

Quotes

The purpose of the Business Colleges is to teach their students to create values by honest work.
- Tomas Bata (1924), cited in: Tribus, Mirón, and C. A. Hayward. Total Quality in Schools of Bisiness and of Engineering. Exergy, Inc. Hayward (1993).

Such a businessman has never become rich whose mouth was full of slander and his heart full of envy of success of the others, who could with great skill reveal the mistakes of his competitor. However that one has never been and will never be poor who serves his customers with words of cordial kindness and whose eyes can see rather the positive than the negative features of the competitor so that he could use them.
- Tomas Bata (1928), translated and cited in: Tribus, Myron. "Lessons from Tomas Bata for the Modern Day Manager." Tvůrčí odkaz Tomáše Bati a současné podnikatelské metody (2001).

The Bata system of management is a testimony to the understanding that capital is knowledge and not money, buildings or technology:Buildings-they are just piles of brick and concrete. Machines-they are a lot of iron and steel. Only people can give life to it all.
- Bata, Tomas. Knowledge in Action: The Bata System of Management. IOS Press, 1992.

Do not pursue money. He who pursues money will never achieve it. Serve! If you serve as best as you can, you will not be able to escape money.
- Attributed to Tomas Bata in: Tribus, Myron. "Lessons from Tomas Bata for the Modern Day Manager." Tvůrčí odkaz Tomáše Bati a současné podnikatelské metody (2001).

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.
- Attributed to Tomáš Baťa in: Rybka, Zdeněk. Principles of the Bata Management System. Tomas Bata University, Faculty of Management and Economics, 2013.

Financial recovery must be preceded by moral recovery.
- Attributed to Tomas Bata at tomasbata.com, 2015

We do not have any production secrets. We invest a lot of effort and money in new research projects. However, before our new invention is used in real life, we usually invent something better. For this reason, we do not have a single patent to protect our inventions.
- Attributed to Tomas Bata at tomasbata.com, 2015

Tomas Bata and Bata-System of management are not well known today even though their success and heritage value are undisputed and awe-inspiring in the New Economy. T. Bata died in 1932 in a plane crash. By the time of his death he had introduced fundamental changes in management philosophy and techniques. Many of Bata approaches have been ‘discovered’ during the last 20 years by the Western World as part of what has become known as the ‘Quality Revolution’. Quality management was practiced by the Bata enterprises since before the World War I, through 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, well before the ‘gurus of quality’ even started thinking about the subject. Japanese visitors came to Zlin to learn about the Bata system well before the World War II. In addition, Bata executives traveled to Japan in 1937 and predicted the industrial rise of Japan at that time.
- Myron Tribus (2000), cited in: Fisher, N. I., and V. N. Nair. "Quality management and quality practice: Perspectives on their history and their future." Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry 25.1 (2009): 1-28.

In the 1920s, Tomás Bat’a built up a large international business using a unique blend of the techniques of scientific management on the one hand and innovative human resources policies on the other. His management methods have become known as the ‘Bat’a system of management’, and are the subject of increasing scholarly interest. Bat’a anticipated many modern management movements such as workplace autonomy, decentralisation, flexible manufacturing and industrial democracy. His slogan, ‘Every worker a capitalist!’, which expressed his views on employee participation and the right.
- Morgen Witzel, Fifty key figures in management. Routledge, 2004. p. 21

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Tomáš Baťa