the means towards improving the individual lives of all Bata employees. Employment
was stable and long term: a part of each worker’s earnings was reinvested in the company
(the initial endowment put up by the company)—each worker became a capitalist
and partial co-owner. Bata personnel policy and management of human resources,
especially employee selection, was multifaceted and pivotal for long-term success.5
Bata claimed that the quality of employee life was a primary concern of the employer
(not of the state). He offered economic incentives to employees to stop drinking
and smoking, or to lose weight. He provided family housing (with gardens) and an
essential social infrastructure: hospitals, museums, churches, swimming pools, recreational
facilities, sport stadiums, and roads—all part of the self-imposed responsibilities
of Bata Enterprises.
He also established and ran his own school of management: an institution considered
too important to be left to the external and traditional providers of business
education. He was seeking enhanced self-reliance, independence and vertical integration:
railroads, waterways, airports, land, forests, even local government—all became
connected to his enterprise. He strove to operate with no debt: all state taxes were paid
according to obsessive principles of integrity.
Thanks to these and similar concepts, Bata’s business grew and flourished even
during the worldwide depression of 1929–1932. He was fully aware of the qualities of
his system: he knew it was a whole which could not be copied in parts—there were no
“company secrets”. Often he assured his associates that no fair competition could ever
pose a threat to their performance.
However, the Bata system was gravely damaged by the “unfair competition” of politics
and Nazi ideology in 1939, and then it was vilified and later proscribed by Marxists
and communists of the post-1945 era. Bata’s own family, managers and workers
were forced into exile.