4.2 Evolution of Bata Management System
The Bata Enterprises was founded by Tomas Bata (1876–1932), the son of a shoemaker
in a small town in Moravia. Strongly influenced by American industrial practices and
the early thinking and experiences of Henry Ford, Bata combined them with the cultural
distinctiveness of his native Moravia and created what is today known as the Bata
Management System. This participative, human-oriented system was decades ahead
of its time, including concepts such as empowerment, worker participation and quality
improvement.
Fortunately, the BMS survived Tomas’s premature death in 1932 and the company
found its largest success and expansion under the leadership of his step-brother Jan
Bata. The BMS had its roots in Henry Ford’s ideas – only those before 1926—as
summarized in his book Today and Tomorrow (Ford 1926). Ford’s early view of management
was based on worker autonomy, knowledge, just-in-time, waste minimization,
quality and customer involvement (customization). It was all but abandoned by Ford
in his turnaround embrace of mass production, taylorism and hierarchical management
in the 1930s. But in Moravia, Tomas Bata remained true to Ford’s original ideas and
brought them to practical fruition in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
The BMS is a system of extraordinary productivity and effectiveness. Its main characteristics
include: integration instead of division of labor, whole-system orientation,
continuous innovation and quality improvement, team and workshop self-management,
profit-sharing and autonomy, workers’ participation and co-determination, clearly-defined
responsibilities, organizational flexibility, vigorous automation and most importantly
an uncompromisingly human-oriented capitalistic enterprise. Every employee
was a partner, co-worker or associate and all workers were to become owners and capitalists.
There are clearly identifiable principles which Tomas Bata evolved, adhered to and
ultimately made to work. He proclaimed his first slogan “Thinking to the people, labor
to the machines” at the factory gate. He eliminated the intermediaries: a large network
of Bata-run stores and outlets complemented and extended his production operations
by integrating customers into the production process.
Bata’s “Our customer, our master” and “Service to the public” were not just slogans,
but sound principles of business. Production and profits were not the ends, but