THE NEED FOR QUALITY The first thing that we need to consider, in any organization, is that quality is the most important thing. The quality of your work defines you.  Whoever you are,  Whatever you do,  I can find the same products and services cheaper somewhere else. But your quality is your signature. Developing and delivering high quality products and services means that you are doing things correctly from the beginning. As a consequence, you are reducing the need for additional services, from verification to warranty.

Total quality management.

We don't have satisfactory answers to questions that ask what we must share with our neighbor for our common good and the rights we retain in the process. Yet such answers will be the legacy of our age. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/U0piYSt35YU is a video segment in which author David Alan Grier expands on his Errant Hashtag column, in which he discusses how the idea of "smart cities" makes more sense than the idea of "smart homes."

For the Common Good

Whether or not an entrepreneur develops the enterprise successfully and increases competitiveness depends on many factors. All businesses, however, are inherently connected with the business environment which significantly influences their performance. In this regard, the state is among the most important factors. It also performs many other roles through which it may be either helpful or harmful in the eyes of a business owner, e.g. it determines the legislative framework of entrepreneurship, sets conditions for starting a business and regulates competition. The way the role of the state is perceived by small and medium-sized enterprises was researched in 2015 as a part of a project at Tomas Bata University in Zlín. The research analysed data from 1,141 respondents from all regions of the Czech Republic and included, among others, the question of the state’s role in the business environment. The presented paper covers three selected areas of the state’s influence on the business environment: creating favourable conditions for the business environment, governmental financial support of entrepreneurs, and administrative burden on entrepreneurs. These areas were also examined with the emphasis on the analysis of differences between the perception of entrepreneurs from different industries and entrepreneurs with different sizes of their businesses. It was revealed that entrepreneurs were very critical to the state’s role in the business environment; in particular, 60% of respondents disagree with the fact that the state creates favourable conditions for business in the Czech Republic. It was proved that the line of business of enterprises correlates with perception of the state’s role within the business environment. The research into perception of a governmental financial support was proved to be dependent on a company size which may signal the support of certain company sizes and influencing their competitiveness.

The perception of governmental support in the context of competitiveness of SMEs in the Czech Republic

Research background: Indebtedness indicators are used to monitor the structure of corporate financial resources. The company's share of its own and foreign resources affects the financial stability of the company. A high share of own re-sources makes the company stable, and independent. With a low share, on the contrary, the company is unstable, market fluctuations and credit uncertainty can have serious consequences. However, foreign capital is cheaper, and too high indebtedness ratios can jeopardize the existence of enterprises.
Purpose of the article: In general, the economic recession worsens the capital structure of enterprises, especially their debt management. Thus, the paper aims to apply the set of 13 indebtedness ratios to a sample of 779 Slovak and Czech enterprises from the construction sector to determine key microeconomic determinants that may influence the level of indebtedness.
Methods: A non-parametric one-way analysis of variance ? the Kruskal-Wallis test ? was used to determine whether the set of indebtedness ratios is the same across countries, districts, and sizes. For analyzing the specific sample pair of stochastic dominance, the pairwise comparison was realized using the Dunn'stest with Bonferonni correction. The Mann-Whitney test was used to compare the differences in the set of indebtedness ratios between two independent groups of enterprises, based on their legal form and country.
Findings & value added: The level of total indebtedness ratio and the self-financing ratio depends on the region as well as on the size of the enterprise and the legal form. In the case of credit indebtedness and debt-to-cash-flow indebted-ness, their dependence on the size of the enterprise and the legal form is obvious. The importance of the region and the legal form of enterprises, vice versa, affect the level of the financial independence ratio. These outputs are relevant for au-thorities, policy makers, or financial institutions to identify financial constraints that construction enterprises face and, as a result, make a long-term contribution to theory in this field.

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Distinctive determinants of financial indebtedness: evidence from Slovak and Czech enterprises

This paper argues that social enterprises (SE) in EU Member States share at least following common features: the dominance of a social or societal objective over market goal, an apparent social responsibility, particularly in the field of profit distribution. However, numeric limits for the criteria of SE identification remain ‘unclear’: in the majority of cases there are no comprehensible requirements regarding the employment of vulnerable groups and the reinvestment of profits into social projects. Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Finland, Italy, Lithuania, and Slovakia advocate accuracy and precision in dealing with the terminology surrounding SE regulatory and legal acts to the greatest extent. Being a significant facilitator of sustainable development, SE growth has a close relationship with certain macroeconomic factors. Our correlation and regression analysis clearly proves that there are certain factors of financial and social environment which have the greatest impact on the increase of the number of SE per 10,000 population, namely: Monetary Freedom, Income Distribution and Helping a Stranger. The first two factors show the impact of government regulation quality in business relation, including the links between employers and employees. The latter factor demonstrates an average social perception of so-called ‘inclusion ideas’ in different societies.

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Towards sustainable economic development via social entrepreneurship

. The issue of business environment for small and medium-sized enterprises is a very actual area of scientific research. Currently, the great importance is given to research people's personal and knowledge preconditions for conducting business. The aim of this article was to examine the relationship between education of entrepreneurs and several aspects of entrepreneurship in the SME segment.Our own research was conducted in the selected regions of the Czech Republic and Slovakia through a questionnaire survey. A total of 449 owners of small and medium-sized companies have been reached. The sample of respondents was divided into two groups: entrepreneurs with and without a university degree. To reach an above mentioned aim, Pearson statistics for a data count, series of 5000 Monte Carlo replication as well as tools of descriptive statistics have been used.Our results have showed that there are significant differences in the attitudes of these two categories of entrepreneurs in their motives for starting business and the knowledge of the lending criteria of commercial banks. On the other hand, the differences in other fields, such as the evaluation of the commercial banks approach, the change of their companiesprofitability, the ability to manage financial risks and the assessment of the academic knowledge usefulness were not confirmed by our research.JEL Classification : L26, O16, G21Keywords: Small and Medium Enterprises, entrepreneurs' education, motivation for doing business, financial risk, credit risk.IntroductionThe relationship between education and entrepreneurship is now being taken as a serious issue in the field of enterprise research due to increased competition in the market from both locally and internationally, availability of new technology, and consumer demand for new products and so on. To be aware of all those affects to the firm one needs to acknowledge the changes in consumer demand, the use of new technologies and analysis of the market competition from different approaches. Thus, education can enhance one's ability to know more in-depth about all those issues and this can create a competitive advantage for the business. Nevertheless, entrepreneurial success and selection of entrepreneurship as an employment can be influenced by various factors, including easy availability of finance sources (Carter et al., 2003; Orser et al., 2006), gender equality (Chowdhury and Audretsch, 2014), entrepreneur education level (Rauch and Rijsdijk, 2013; Naude et al., 2008), social mobility and structure (Lim and Envick, 2011), government support (Elam and Terjesen, 2010), Self-skills and confidence (Minniti and Nardone, 2007; Wilson et al., 2007). However, among the above variables, one factor can easily be identified as an entrepreneurial idiosyncratic quality, which can affect the choice between self-employment (being an entrepreneur) and other employment opportunities, is education.Researchers, while dealing with the importance of human capital in doing business found out that, entrepreneurs' education can have a positive impact on the entrepreneurship selection and performance (Lafuente and Vaillant, 2013; Naude et al., 2008; Bonte et al., 2007). It is also noticeable that, the formal education can increase the managerial ability of an individual and that can lead a person to become an entrepreneur. However, as argued by Velez (2009) and Mengistae (2006) education is not free of cost and for which it may then lead an individual to become a safe waged earner; since, the return from the enterprise is not guaranteed as like as the employed worker. Mamman (2014) and Oosterbeck et al. (2010) further argue that, the education system is not so well developed in many developing countries which can increase the self-confidence of an individual to start an own business. Hence, previous empirical researches in this area are not providing any conclusive answer about the relationship between education and entrepreneurship in the segment of the SME. …

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Education and entrepreneurship in the sme segment in economic transformation

Unemployment has a number of negative, economic, social and psychological effects on unemployed people and their families. Lowered household income leads to a constrained fulfilment of individual and collective needs, which has a significant impact on the quality of life and perceived health condition of the unemployed. The aim of this study is the identification of relationships between the quality of life and socio-economic status of unemployed persons. The study was carried out among 403 registered unemployed persons (246 women, 157 men) from Wroclaw, Poland. The main method used in the study was the diagnostic questionnaire survey. Respondents’ quality of life was assessed using the World Health Organization Quality of Life (WHOQOL-BREF) questionnaire, and their socio-economic status with author’s own S-ESQ questionnaire. Arithmetic means and standard deviation were calculated. Correlations between respondents’ quality of life and socio-economic status were checked with the Kruskal-Wallis oneway analysis of variance and Dunn’s post-hoc tests. The ex-ante level of statistical signifikance was set at α < 0.05. The mean health-related quality of life score of the unemployed respondents under study was higher than the mean perceived health condition score. As for the four quality of life domains, the respondents reported the highest scores in the social domain and psychological domain, followed by the physical and environmental domains. The analysis of mean scores of overall quality of life of the unemployed revealed statistically significant differences between groups of jobless Wroclaw residents with regard to such factors as age, number of household members, and per capita income. Respondents’ age, education, marital status, persons per household, per capital income, and having savings were also significant differentiating factors of perceived health condition. The results of the study can be significant for public health policies in Poland and other countries at a similar level of economic development.

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Health-related quality of life and socio-economic status of the unemployed

This submitted paper deals with the selected tools that are a part of resource management in the context of sustainable development. These instruments mainly cover corporate social responsibility, enterprise resource planning systems and strategic management with selected management models. Enterprise resource planning systems are the information base and support tools that a company’s management uses for making decisions. The aim of these tools is to support a decrease in the consumption of raw materials, energy and other limited resources, which in turn increases the company’s performance. This is mainly due to lower costs and increased corporate profitability. On the other hand, all these activities help to reduce the unfavorable ecologic impacts of business activities. This paper discusses the various ways to increase business performance through selected strategic management models through improving a company’s competitiveness. The last part of the article is aimed at looking at the results of a survey that was conducted in the Czech Republic at the beginning of 2013. The research was focused on companies located in this country and it answered questions that surrounded on how these companies improved and increased their business performance in the market from the sustainable development point of view.

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The analysis of selected resource management tools used in the Czech Republic

A company’s ﬁnancial performance is essential when investors compare its competitive position to determine how attractive it is. That is why performance needs to be evaluated from both the qualitative and quantitative points of view. The classical ﬁnancial approach to measuring a company’s performance based on past results is no longer sufﬁcient; it needs to be complemented with a non-ﬁnancial measurement method. This paper focuses on ﬁnancial analysis, which is one of the tools used for assessing the performance and ﬁnancial status of companies. The current individual ﬁnancial analysis indicators must be processed taking into account the inﬂuences that potentially affect and distort the results, as well as with their comparability over time and within a single accounting unit or among individual companies. As far as ﬁnancial analysis is concerned, attention has to be paid to the method used for evaluating assets and liabilities, as this issue greatly affects the informative utility of ﬁnancial statements and the ﬁnal data relevant to income from operations, which are the input data for processing individual ﬁnancial indicators. After that the paper deals with the research that was focused on companies located in the Czech Republic. The aim of the research was to analyse the methods of measurement of ﬁnancial performance use the Czech companies. Another important task is to plot the approach used by companies to conduct ﬁnancial analysis in the Czech Republic. It should illustrate whether companies process such analysis independently and regularly using their in-house information systems and identify the most commonly- assessed indicators. It is important that companies process their ﬁnancial statements so that they can subsequently be assessed and compared over time while maintaining adherence to the same accounting procedures.

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An evaluation of selected assets and their impact on the declarative characteristic of ratio indicators in financial analyses

The submitted article is focused on the problems of the application of strategic management in companies that are located in the Czech Republic as a tool of resources management support in accordance with the principle of sustainable development. The first part of the article describes sustainable development in general. The next part deals with the description of resources management. The main goal of the article is based on the analysis of usage of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems for the needs of strategic management. The application of key models such as Balanced Scorecard (BSC), Total Quality Management (TQM), Management by Objectives (MBO), Six Sigma and others is subject to analysis in accordance with ERP systems implemented in medium sized and large companies. The presented information was obtained from the intensive survey that took place in January and February 2013. Strategic management is an area that is focused on long-term planning and strategic direction of an enterprise. Findings of management indicate that it is important to manage and systematically evaluate the company in a long-term perspective if the company wants to be successful and enjoy excellent financial health. From the sustainable development and resources management point of view it is important to use information systems that help to improve the efficiency of managerial control of an enterprise. On the other hand it is crucial to analyze whether the used ERP systems support higher profitability and enable application of strategic management models. The main goal of the vast majority of companies is based on the increase or maximization of own market value that is achieved by strategy of the company in a long-term period. The right strategy is important for survival of enterprise in today’s competitive market and rapidly changing environment.

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Helena Jáčová

Papers

Education and entrepreneurship in the sme segment in economic transformation

Health-related quality of life and socio-economic status of the unemployed

The analysis of selected resource management tools used in the Czech Republic

An evaluation of selected assets and their impact on the declarative characteristic of ratio indicators in financial analyses

Application of strategic management in enterprises located in the Czech Republic as a tool of resources management support