“I should probably start with my joining the Baťa company. The Baťa company was recruiting new employees for the whole country and the whole world through application forms in their shops. At the beginning, the number of trainees who applied was negligible. For the first batch of students sometime in the 1920s there were not many applicants, but later, in the 1930s, the demand was already enormous, because the brand Baťa was already renowned. And thus there were almost ten thousand apprentices applying for one thousand openings. During that time, they were already dong psycho-technic tests, which lasted for another two or three days, but they were only for pre-selected candidates. They had already chosen people from the preliminary applications whom they invited for interviews. It is worth noting that they were not interested in children who were from well-to-to families, but they were rather interested in applicants who wanted to work and who tried hard. And so they selected about a thousand students from about ten thousand applicants, that was probably the most successful year. It was not that so many people would apply every year. At the beginning there were fewer people, because there were various specializations: shoe-making, chemical, leather-making, electricians, machine fitters, tool makers – whatever you like. It depended on what Baťa needed most in that given moment and so he tried to train his own people.”
“One of the employees there was Vlasta Pech, his name probably won’t tell you anything. But he was the one who had invented the radiolocator Tamara. He began working there and they fired him for the loss of trust from the working class. They kicked out about ten or fifteen people from the Institute. The poor Vlastík did not have any other job and he had to work as a repairman of television sets and radios. But then somehow, probably through friends and acquaintances, the Military Academy picked him up and he transferred to that house in Žabiny here – it was a civilian family villa and they had their research department for radiolocation there and Vlastík then worked there all the time. Anyway, as a graduate, I was there with him as if nothing happened, and he was the tutor of my diploma thesis.”
Miroslav Barvíř was born on July 6, 1929 in Zlín. His father worked for the Baťa company as a workshop foreman. In 1931 he was dispatched to the town Chelmek in Poland in order to establish a shoe-making workshop there. The family followed him there. After their return home, Miroslav completed elementary and higher elementary school. Then he managed to pass strict tests for the Baťa school, where he received very solid fundaments for his subsequent life. After completing the general part of the Baťa curriculum comprising of various fields, he chose to specialize in electro- technical study and he earned his trade certificate as an electrical engineer. After he had worked the required number of years for the Baťa company as stipulated in the contract, Miroslav changed jobs and began working for the company MEZ (Moravian Electro-technical Company), where he worked as a budget planner in its Brno branch. Miroslav began studying at the faculty of electrical engineering at the Technical University in Brno, which was however transferred to the VTA (Military Technical Academy) a year later. After graduation in 1955 he started working in the Institute for Radio Technical Research under the company Tesla Pardubice, specializing in radiolocation. It was here where he met the legendary Vlastimil Pech, inventor of the passive radiolocator. Ten years later Miroslav became employed by the Technical University in Brno (VUT), where he worked in the department of technical cybernetics. While working there, he decided to write a treatise which would link technical regulation with the theory of economic management. He proposed a theory of company management, for which he used general equations for physical phenomena as much as possible. He realized that his approach was very close to the practices that Baťa had intuitively introduced in his factory. Miroslav persevered with his theory in spite of being misunderstood by his colleagues and he displayed Baťa-like diligence, endurance and ambition.
On the left: personnel manager Hlavnička, "old man" - manager of the HR department, Mrs. Hlavničková; on the left: the oldest employee who retired in that year
On the left: personnel manager Hlavnička, "old man" - manager of the HR department, Mrs. Hlavničková; on the left: the oldest employee who retired in that year
