Jan Bata was one of the greatest entrepreneurs in Czechoslovak history. The Bata organization under Jan Bata’s leadership experienced rapid growth during the worldwide financial crisis and at a time of growing tensions in Europe during the 1930s. Bata’s plan was to transform his business from a local to a global manufacturing enterprise. To accomplish this task Bata needed a deeper understanding of the worldwide footwear market.
People who didn’t know Jan Bata thought that the world tour was some kind of publicity stunt. It was nothing of the sort. Bata was carefully laying the plans to expand the Bata organization. He was examining the state of the world footwear market, the competition, the supply of key raw materials and worldwide economic conditions.
Plans for setting up and operating new footwear manufacturing facilities was carefully detailed in J.A.Bata’s book Průmyslové Město, a book that detailed all of the experiences Bata had learned from building foreign factories. All of these experiences, designs, procedures and instructions would would be used to build all of the new factories around the world.
Rubber was an important ingredient in the production of footwear. Bata’s expedition was studying the economic and market conditions of rubber which was detailed in a study published the following year in the Bata weekly, Zlin, No. 5, 1937, entitled "The Problems of Raw Materials." Rubber was an important ingredient for shoemaking and for employment. Rubber had nearly doubled in price from 1931 to 1936. Compounding the supply problem were falling retail prices for rubber shoes. Retail prices had fallen nearly seventy percent over the same period. Jan Bata needed to develop a solution to this problem.
To help the reader to understand the economic issues Bata faced. J.A.Bata was interviewed in the The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser on February 10, 1937. There he stated, "There are only two countries in the world where Bata shoes are not sold: Russia and Japan. They are prohibited in Russia. In Japan the duty is prohibitive. Japan is one of the countries which says to the world: You should buy from me, but I wouldn't buy anything from you."
Bata was interested in learning about the social structure of Japanese society, their concept of family, and the relationship between an employer and his employee, as well as a workers attitude toward his job and his company. Bata learned that Japan's competitive power was not only due to wages. The Japanese workers were only paid a fifth of what Bata's employees earned. They also learned that Japan's competitive advantage came from developing working teams.
By the outbreak of the Second World War, Bata had accomplished his goal of increasing the size of the Bata organization from a localized organization Czech organization of about seventeen thousand people to a worldwide enterprise with more than one hundred thousand people.
Bata’s worldwide tour ended on May 1, 1937 landing at the airfield in Batov (Otrokovice) then to Zlin where J.A.Bata was welcomed home by a crowd of more than one hundred thousand people.
John Nash, 10.6.2015
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The legacy, deeds, and significance of Jan Antonin Bata, not only his business enterprise, but also his leading role in the anti-Nazi underground resistance, are in his homeland practically unknown. The Czech official places and media are silent here, despite the fact that they do know, or better, should know, about his life long activities. It is more than obvious that something is very wrong in our Czech country when heroes of his kind are still, even after 70 years, purposely banished from the public view and knowledge.
Jan Šinágl, 12.6.2015
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