Entrepreneur Extraordinary: Biography of Tomas Bata

This book is a story of a great adventure arising from a business where adventures could be least expected. Although it’s hero, the late Tomas Bata, kept his eyes focused sharply on the ground (in the shoe business-he has to) his mind was soaring high in dreams of a mission to make all mankind well shod. How he did it and what his motives and accomplishments were is presented in this biography of the man and his time with considerable detail and first hand knowledge.

We see a man, who having run away from home at the age of fourteen  to start his own business, was continuously impatient with both time and environment visualizing the opportunities which, although at hand, were never noticed by his competitors during his life. He was man who could visualize such opportunities even in the most difficult situations as indicated from his attitude toward the Great Depression of 1929: “Half of mankind is barefoot and only a fraction of the world’s population is well shod,” he said at the time of world-wide unemployment. “Look how little we’ve done so far and how much work is waiting for all shoemakers every-where in the world.” And when the difficulties continued, he growled into their faces in 1930: “I would rather work for nothing than do nothing. Only when you work, can you keep hoping to find a way.”

Shoemaker, salesman and organizer of many industries, Tomas Bata was a  man among men, changing the simple folk in and around his birthplace into modern industrial workers and managers of business and salesmen resembling a now  almost extinct type  of man who, in their pursuance of their business, have discovered in former centuries new territories and lifted up the standard of life and living everywhere.

Necessity made him a politician to obtain the right to rebuild a whole city, a teacher pioneering new methods of education, a builder who combined building of factories and houses with a businessman type of social service. However, he was first and always an entrepreneur extraordinary. As such, he attacked every problem with gusto of a prize fighter, and the zeal of a missionary, transferring an ideal into ideas--and these again into plans and actions. Ideal? What ideal and ideas? Some of them can be discerned from the pages of this book, others in the fierce loyalty and performance o f the men whom he brought up to spread his message of entrepreneurship to the four corners of the world.

In some ways, and perhaps indirectly, a reader could take this book as a challenge. If its hero succeeded in turning a simple business into a real adventure of service and a powerful way of life, why not you? Today’s  world needs men of Tomas Bata’s caliber as much as his world needed them several decades ago, and perhaps nowadays even more. It is this type of man who provides the answers to the crucial questions of our time, i.e., whether our society, enjoying the good things of life, will survive as a home of free men. This, in the author’s concept, is a final message arising from the biography of this extraordinary man, Tomas Bata: “He only earns his freedom and existence who daily conquers them anew.”