Bata’s enterprise was organized and behaving as a living organism—learning, adapting
and self-organizing. It was also viewed as such by Bata and his associates—a label
for Bata employees, copied by today’s Wal-Mart. Bata employees felt to be parts
and components of a living organism, not of some well-oiled, well-crafted machinery.
Bata Co. practiced the system of Ten Principles (Table 1), i.e. key dimensions and their
practical realizations, which formed the Bata Management System (BMS):
The company was a privately held corporation, not a publicly owned one: there
was no public stock and no public trading with company ownership. The company
created a harmonious human, ecological and architectural co-existence with its immediate
environs of Zlin and the Moravian region as a whole. Employees were partners