You should look into the opera a little deaper – this was perfunctory [“The Fat Lady’s Finale?” March 7]. See below:
50 Easy Steps to Remove a Major Metropolitan Opera Company 1. Begin Search for new General Director of company. Ignore the 3-year oportunity for such. Do not research background of candidates, and do not listen to professional staff for suggestions or input. Don’t even do a google search on candidate — too revealing!
2. Hire duplicate General Director during contract with previous. Pay both.
3. Hire duplicate Marketing Director during contract with previous. Pay Both.
4. Hire duplicate Director of Development. Pay Both.
5. Since new General Director is not an artistic director (unlike previous), hire additional Artistic Advisor. He’ll commute 16 hours at your cost.
6. Be sure new leadership also ignores advice, training and expertise of seasoned staff.
7. Ignore advice of departing management regarding fiscal challenges. Instead, balance budget by putting in a bigger revenue number — do not identify new sources of funding.
8. Pay for housing of new General Director.
9. Pay for cell phone of General Director.
10. Pay for high-end Golf Club Membership for General Director.
11. Ignore company mission statement: grand opera in a financially viable manner.
12. Spend amazingly on self and senior staff comforts. Run out of money by second show.
13. Following first cash crisis, ignore continued projections of insolvency
14. “Fix” the self-sustaining education & outreach department — freeloaders! – and decrease their staff. Increase their revenue projections to support remainder of company.
15. Remove most seasoned, flexible, and knowledgeable staff member.
16. Sales fall. Advertise next opera during re-runs of “Sanford and Son”.
17. Lower sales goals beneath budget projections to make your company look good. “Just miss” those goals.
18. Allow flippant spending to create $1 million deficit in one year.
19. Liquidate endowment to compensate for deficit. Do not ask permission from donors to do so.
20. Respond to decreasing ticket demand by expanding season by ten performances; i.e., meet the decreased demand with increased supply (read that again…).
21. Spend $30,000 on a marketing brochure; waste money on page showing sold out one man show.
22. As subscription brochures are a) late, b) huge, c) expensive and confusing, discard remaining brochures. Besides, recipients throw it away thinking it’s an annual report!
23. Structure new season budget with $500,000 deficit.
24. Tell staff you want to keep everyone. Fire all customer service staff.
25. Entire Marketing Department quits. As this proves the marketing director must be excellent, ignore it.
26. Fire Event-Coordinator. Hire Associate Director to continue same duties at double the salary.
27. Hire General Director to conduct opera. Be sure to pay him for that. Accept declaration that he will be unavailable for 6 weeks before that production. Continue directors pay as well during absence.
28. After finding out General Director is publicly on a “Swingers” website, “discover” that he’s been bad with money. Allow him to “resign”. Pay him anyway (why stop? You’re still paying for the previous General Director anyway.).
29. Promote Artistic Advisor to Artistic Director; but don’t tell him.
30. Send new press announcement when Artistic Advisor declines above position.
31. Create Operating Committee to run company, making sure no members have arts-management experience.
32. Produce newsletter with banner dates misspelled (Deccember [sic]). Blame staff.
33. Contrary to past successes, decide from “resigned” General Director’s advice that a deficit year is best for merging with equally cash-poor company. Do not consult staff for their opinions.
34. Contrary to past successes, decide deficit year is the best season to cancel sales of further seasons, when cash flow is most challenging. Assume new money will “occur”.
35. With severe cash flow crisis in progress, spend $60,000 to upgrade database.
36. Sign contract to replace paid-for computers with $1,000 leased machines. Assume you can print money.
37. When selecting and installing new software and hardware, remove IT person from decision-making. Then ask for help fixing resultant problems.
38. Continue to miss lowered goals. Advertise on “Bravo” network.
39. Create marketing postcard with scanned photo blown up 50 times bigger than original. Pretend pictured singer does not look greased as a result.
40. In order to obtain funding to deal with cash flow crisis and merger, spend $40,000 on consultant to write a three-year business plan. Do not give sample season or budget to this business planner.
41. Give executive staff five days to make realistic budgetary projections; again, do not base it on any specific repertoire.
42. With no production management in place, assign budget for two main stage productions based on “what seems reasonable.” Do not consult experts in deciding what may be reasonable.
43. Numbers show a continued structural deficit: i.e., merger is a bad idea. Change numbers. As purpose is to give funders a “one opera company or none” proposition, leave them no choice but to give you money in hopes you’ll change. Besides, you’ll blame the staff when company doesn’t reach those mythical numbers anyway.
44. Announce that there will be zero layoffs due to the merger. Then, fire seven staff due to the merger. Fire 4 more later.
45. Do not inform community of merger or specifics thereof; let the media “leak” it.
46. After media announcement, spend $1,000 on mailing revealing less information than the media leak.
47. Announce you are “right-sizing” the company to make the remaining staff feel secure (?!?).
48. Fire website designer, but order her to train new inexperienced replacement. Complain when she’s busy with a new workload, and isn’t available for you.
49. Send President on stage before each performance with repetitious gag of mutilated furniture.
50. Finally, merge the two companies. Be sure to elect the same president.
Former Opera Emplyee
Cleveland
This article appears in Mar 7-13, 2007.
I have to say as a “Former Right Sized Employee of Cleveland Opera” and having lived through the above changes, I’m so happy that this article was written. So much has changed, gone wrong , and simply been wrong with the management of the company since April 1 , 2004 I can’t believe Rosenberg (who seriously wanted a change) had not written an article in the same light. I hope the mutilated furniture does not reflect Opera Cleveland’s houses this coming season, but reality may be a bitter pill to swallow.
Former Opera Employee
Cleveland
The year that Lyric Opera Cleveland and Cleveland Opera became Opera Cleveland was the year that should never have been. It is clear to all who worked for Lyric that the company was successful because of the truly talented local people used to create a company with passion and expertise and love of the art that was being created AND that the new configuration and the new administration would obliterate the fresh, unigue company into an old, same old, same old opera on such a scale that no one would care (and doesn’t); that audiences would go to sleep watching what had and has been done again and again; and that the people who should be running and working for the new company would be treated like lepers or fired or never used in any capacity again. Yes, this is a run-on sentence but the company is a run-on mistake being allowed to run-on!!! into a bigger and better deficit.
Former Lyric Opera Employee happily working in more “artistic venues”.
The new manager says “Cleveland will get the opera company that it fights for and chooses to support.” This is precisely the same kind of arrogance that led to the problems. The burden is on the COMPANY to scale itself appropriately to the available resources. The definition of insanity is doing the exact same thing, but expecting a different result…
Bravo! Well written. While it only scratches the surface of how ridiculous the past few years have been, it definitely hits the stupid on the head.
At last! The untold story! How is it that the media has no idea why a General Director “mysteriously resigns,” yet the entire performing arts community knows? Goddess knows we’re gossipy enough.
I wish someone would write something like this about the (former) Cleveland Ballet, especially since “the beloved Nutcracker” is coming to Playhouse Square in December. Christ, how many times were they bailed out, until the people with the money got tired of that shit? And then to have Nahat complain that Cleveland doesn’t support the arts.
How do these higher ups get away with pissing away all this money, while production people are making crap? Ah, the glamour of showbiz…
Thank God someone said it. As a singer who used to perform in Cleveland and fell in love with it, I’m terribly sad to see the rubble that it has become. Opera in Cleveland has gone from one of the best gigs to a laughing stock of the business in only a few short years. Fix it!
All so true, and so sad! The rate we are going nothing will be left in this town, but as long as boards of arts organizations continue to keep there heads in there butts, not listening to the actual people that know what is going on, this will continue to happen… where was the board during all of this, and why did they let it happen? Shame on both Cleveland Opera and LYric opera cleveland for throwing decades worth of work down the drain!
Cleveland Opera: A top-notch producing, team oriented, ethical, frugal, transparent, and well managed organization.
Opera Cleveland: A cold, tense, cut-throat, deceptive, unethical, money wasting, arrogant, thoughtless, and poorly run corporation.
The new(est) General Manager was handed a really poor deal. He’s not to blame…the board members(who haven’t resigned) are.
Board members have a responsibility to ensure the company is properly using donations. Money was WASTED on things like outrageously expensive brochures or remodeling an office, while human beings were laid off due to budget constraints.
Also, it was especially difficult when staff was being cut dramatically and the remaining staff was expected to do sometimes two or three people’s jobs. The staff, who were talented and committed individulas, already did whatever it took to get the job done–because the end product was what mattered, were treated like expendable slackers.
Managers would tell staff, at board members request, (after reporting their staffs concerns and complaints to board members), that everyone had to push up their sleeves, work longer and harder and insisted that the opera had too many staff members to begin with.
It was a painful experience to see the company go from what it was to what it is and to see really good people hurt in the process.
The “Cleveland Paradigm” at its best! This seems to be how many, if not most, of the region’s non-profits and quasi-public entities are run.
Hooray to whoever wrote this — hopefully it has been passed to Donald Rosenberg or another more public forum by now. While it was painful at first, those of us who were “right-sized” are now breathing a sigh of relief that we were not trapped working for a company that didn’t value us, our talents, or our experienced opinions. The new General Director (who, by the way, has the full support of us former employees) has his hands full with the task of ridding the company of the dregs that remain of his predecessor to get Opera Cleveland on its feet, both artistically and financially.
To blend two companies of such diverse styles and audiences (after all, “opera is opera” according to the board president Peter Rubin) and expect to be welcomed with open arms by both audiences was asinine. To change the season schedule because “nobody in Cleveland wants to go out in the winter” (per their new Marketing Director from the South) was short-sighted at best — how on earth could a production company stay in business without producing a show for a full year? Oh yes, by cutting loose its knowledgeable, experienced, modestly paid staff and keeping its new bloated management team. And don’t get me started on the decision to perform opera in the — to put it kindly — “acoustically-challenged” Bolton Theatre at the Play House!
We wish Jeff Sodowsky the best in his efforts to undo the damage done by the Board and its Operating Committee.
A proud FRECO and COFFEE (Cleveland Opera Former and Favorite EmployeE) member
These are all issues with which the Board should have been wrestling all along. How is it that the former employees knew the issues (and probably had some excellent suggestions for solutions) but the Board did not? I, too, wish Jeff all the best in his mighty endeavors to salvage what were once two wonderful arts organizations.