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Tony Hall: The art of management
 Hall: I'm passionate about what we do here and the people who work here. SPECIAL REPORTYOUR SAY
LONDON, England (CNN) -- CNN Financial Editor Todd Benjamin speaks to Tony Hall -- Director of the Royal Opera House -- about the art of management. Benjamin: There was upheaval in the Royal Opera House before you. What have you done to bring stability? Hall: I hope what I'm doing is concentrating very much on the art. It struck me when I came here and people said, "what the hell are you doing that job for?" As you said, lots of people have tried it and didn't last very long. I hope that what I've done is concentrate on why people come here. And people come here bluntly, not because of the management and not because we're making the books balance and all those sorts of things. They come here because of the things that happen on the stage: Brilliant opera, brilliant ballet and all sorts of other things. So what I've tried to do is get people to concentrate on that as opposed to all the other things that go into running an opera house like this. Benjamin: How do you manage artistic expectations against the reality of managing the books? Hall: I think the key to this is actually building teams. When I first came here, the great conductor, Edward Dahn, said to me: "Opera is all about teams, and never ever forget that". And I think that's absolutely true. It's very interesting and actually, people instinctively know that. They know it here on the stage. You've got an opera you want to get on or a ballet and everyone comes together to do an impossible thing, night after night. Benjamin: But you have massive egos. Hall: But not so many big egos as you think. And I think the egos, when they're there is because people are doing something which is quite extra-ordinary. I mean, I could not go on that stage through there and sing and get those notes and do what singers do or do what dancers do. And I think whatever you do, however you're managing this place, you've got to appreciate that people are doing extra-ordinary things and manage them accordingly. So cope with some of those things, try to lower the temperature and be there to enable them to do their best. Benjamin: How is running a public institution like this different from being in the private sector? Hall: Hugely different, because the demands on you and how people judge success are very, very different. I've got a number plates that I have to keep spinning. I have to break even. If I make a big profit then I'm a public organisation, why am I making a profit, why aren't I investing in the art? If I have full houses, well that's fine, but what sort of people are coming to see your performances? Are they poor people, rich people? What are they like? If I run non-stop Toscas and non-stop Sleeping Beauties - god forbid that we would actually do that - because we need to be having a very, very broad representation and doing all sorts of things that are very testing of the audiences. So I think it's tougher to run these sorts of organisations. Hall: Clive Hollick, a very successful businessmen in this country, and now a chairman of a big arts organisation here said that when running an arts organisation you should really add two or maybe three zeroes to the budget to get the comparable scale or complexity to running a private sector company. They are very different. Each have enormous pressures on them. But I think the pressures on you to deliver something that people can see is successful in the arts is a hard one. Benjamin: There is a perception of the Royal Opera House as being elite and not accessible to everyone. Is that a fair assessment? Hall: No it's not and one of the things about a place like this, a public institution like this is all sorts of myths about it persist and one of my jobs when I came here was to say, lets look at those myths, lets analyse them and find out whether they are right or wrong. Fact: 60 percent of the people who come here earn under £30,000 a year. That is not a rich person's club by any means. And an awful lot of them are young people and an awful lot of them come from outside London as well, so on all sorts of basic criteria, the people who come here are not the people you often see written about this place. We attract a very, very broad cross-section of people. Last season, 45 percent of people who came here were first-time comers to the opera house. That's brilliant. I mean, that's really showing that in classical music, in opera and in ballet, you can bring in new people if your approach is right and the things that you put on are right too. Benjamin: You had a long career with the BBC. Are there similarities between running the BBC and running the Royal Opera House or are they completely different? Hall: No, no, there are similarities. In fact, both are about performance, in a way. You can't be an hour late with a story that's just broken. You need to be there. Here it's the same, we've got to be on stage tonight at 7:30pm. All the pressures that go into making that happen are very similar. The big difference I think is that if before a big performance I walk around the hall where we're sitting right now, I'm absolutely there with the audience, the audience is right in front of me. And I can sit in the auditorium and I can feel the audience, I can see the audience, I can see what they like and I can see what maybe they don't quite like so much. So that sense of being very close to the audience is something you don't have in television. But I think both things have in common creativity and how you support creativity. I see my job here as enabling the music director, Tony Pappano and the director of the royal ballet, Monica Mason, to deliver the sort of programs, artistically, that they want to deliver. And I think it's very similar with news in a way. You want your correspondents, you want your editors, you want your front people to deliver the sort of things they want to do. Benjamin: Who ultimately has the say when you have a difference with an artistic director? Hall: Well, it has not happened yet and I don't want it to happen and I think if that does happen and I have to make some sort of judgement then that's probably a failure on my part. What I'm here to do, what we're here to do is to make their dreams real, is to do the ambitious things so that people will then say that the Opera House is really delivering, internationally. Nobody else in the world can beat us on what we do artistically and it's their dreams that will make that possible. Benjamin: These productions are hugely expensive. How do you balance the books against the visions of your artistic directors? Hall: Well, you have to look at the program the artistic directors are proposing each year. They are very adept, the place is very adept at working out what you have to do to bring lots of people in and you can charge them against the things that are more risky. It's a bit like running a TV channel. If you're running something like BBC1 you're going to have the things you know people are going to want to watch with the things that are more testing, but is the essence of public service broadcasting. It's exactly the same here. If we just ran Tosca or La Traviata, however brilliant or however good they were, and they would be good here, that would not be enough. We also have to have the Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Stunning, stunning production. The new works, like Tom Ades's The Tempest. All those sort of things, you need to have mixed in with the things you know people are going to go with. Actually I find making those combinations happen really, really exciting. It's a complexity I love. Benjamin: Would you worry about reaction to bringing Jerry Springer: The Opera here? Hall: I saw Jerry Springer: The Opera, I enjoyed it immensely, it's not really an opera, it's a musical. It's right it was on in the National Theatre, that was the right home for it and I wish it well. But we should do equally testing things here, of that I have no doubt. Benjamin: What are you most passionate about? Hall: I'm passionate about what we do here and the people who work here. When I first came here people were asking me, are you sure you should be going there? What's it like? We've seen documentaries about the place, we've read about the place, what's it like? And I said it's very like the BBC. It's full of people who care immensely, who work very long hours, do brilliant, brilliant things, right the way from back here where people are making wigs, costumes, props, and jewellery to the people on the stage, to the people who are marketing what we do. These are people who really, really care about this place and I love that. I love being in an environment where people are passionate about what they do. Benjamin: Why did you take the job? Hall: I'd be nuts - I thought about it for a nanosecond - I'd be nuts to turn it down. I mean it's a risk, a risk on the Opera House's part and a risk for me I suppose but I cared about opera, I cared about ballet, I'd been coming here since I was about 21, 22, something like that. I cared about the place and it took me not very long to think, if you can do anything to do something to make this place work, you should do it. I love BBC News, I love the BBC. It was a wonderful, testing, trying job. But to do this was a challenge I simply couldn't say no to. Benjamin: Are the finances sound right now? Should the government be doing more? Hall: No. My view is that if the government can keep giving us a grant that goes up in line with inflation, it's about 30% of our total turnover, so it's important, but not by any means a dominant factor. If we can keep selling tickets to people, and the average ticket sales here are 91% of the cash, but 95% of the seats are taken each year. But if we can carry on fundraising, if we can look to making some money out of hiring out this building and other commercial ventures then I think that's a healthy balance of funding streams coming into this organisation. I wouldn't like any one to be dominant. I like the fact that we have to go out there and sell our tickets, I like the fact that we have to go out there and get people to support us, and they are very generous to us. I love the fact that there are things we can do commercially as well. Benjamin: You're a passionate reader. What do you do to bring that passion to your job here? Hall: I love novels. I also like history. And why? Because they're all about people and their about stories. I love stories, I absolutely love stories. I think stories are what bind us together as human beings, I think they're what make us tick, I think we learn from them. I think it's right back to Beowulf or the Iliad or the Odyssey, which I love; my favourite book is the Odyssey. I think this sense of us all telling each other stories from which we then learn, about our own conditions and about ourselves. This place is all about stories. Stories through dance, stories through opera, whatever. It's all about stories. So I continue my passion for opera and ballet into reading as well. And history, I've always been fond of. I've written a couple of books myself. And I just think learning about what others have done, how others have coped with things is phenomenally useful. Benjamin: How long do you see yourself in this position? What do you want your legacy to be? Hall: I'm here as long as they'll have me. I hope my legacy is that people will feel that the place has been well run, that new audiences come to find what we do and that the artistic direction from Tony and from Monica has been really given the amount of steam it needs to really make it hum. And I hope I can deliver the resources those two people need. Benjamin: A certain chunk of money comes from corporate sponsorships. Is it a tough sell to a lot of businesses? Hall: Yes, because the days when you could say, look, to the chairman of a company, I guess, come and support what we're doing, bring in people, your guests and have a nice quiet evening and then go and see the opera or the ballet - those days are long gone. You've now got to argue very much to be part of the core statement a firm makes about itself. Let me give you an example. We've got an incredibly successful relationship with Travelex. Travelex sponsor a hundred seats every Monday for half the season at £10. You have to go online to get these seats. We found 24,000 people, newcomers, want to come here for those £10 seats. It's utterly brilliant. For that, we had to argue very hard with Travelex to say would that fit with where Travelex is positioning themselves? Would it be something that they could see the value for? Now I enjoy that, I think that's how we should approach sponsorship. The other is of people who just absolutely love opera, ballet, what we do and they ... Benjamin: John brown, BP for instance? Hall: Yeah John Brown at BP is a classic example. He believes in these big screens, which are bringing in thousands of people, thousands of people to see what we do dotted around the country, watching these big screens in the summer. Or they can be all sorts of individuals, too numerous to name, who can give anything from fifty pounds to some millions of pounds because they believe in this place. Benjamin: Your greatest moment since you came? My greatest moment since I came? There are so many. I think it is night after night, sitting and watching fabulous performances and seeing so many ballets and operas that it's a privilege to see. I think actually watching Tom Ades pull together a brand new opera last year, The Tempest and watching that new piece establish itself and win an audience was a great highlight for me. Likewise actually watching Manon and watching many different interpretations of Manon in the ballet. Darcey Bussell, Sylive Guillem, watching both interpret something really ... by the end of that ballet I felt really strung out. That's been a highlight for me too. Benjamin: And why would you say the arts are so important in our lives? Hall: It's a no-brainer for me. It's part of how you define who you are, what you are, where you've come from, in a big sense. In a very micro sense, if you come in here one evening, 7:15, 7:30 and you've had a lousy day, I bet you, within 5 minutes or within 10 minutes, you've forgotten about that and you're transported somewhere else. And only the arts can do that: an opera, a ballet, a painting, whatever. The arts can do that: a play. And that, I think, is a fantastically important role in people's lives. 
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