The Crucible Theatre Case Study - Essay Example

What is the basis of strategy formulation in the Crucible Theatre Trust Comment on the management of the risk and the crises evident in the Case Study. The Crucible Theatre (from hereon referred to as "Crucible") is an enterprise that is owned, operated, and managed by a legally registered company with the Trust as its board of directors (or, strictly speaking, trustees). Like any other enterprise, the theatre receives income, has expenditures, hires employees, and faces many problems. As part of its strategic management function, the Trust should have focused on the long-term identification, development, and exploitation of the Crucible's core competencies, thought about the concept of the corporation and its mission, and designed the management processes to achieve the mission, which is why the Crucible existed in the first place.

In effect, the Trust's main function is to set the strategy: give an over-all "direction" and "destination" for the business and the guidelines on how to get there. Then, operating management takes care of the details that are part of making the business enterprise succeed. It is understandable that at the beginning, the Crucible's management had problems as shown by the theatre's construction cost over-runs (by 184,000 or 26 percent over budget) and the low theatre attendance.But as the years passed, the number of "empty" seats, the financial losses (if not for the increasing amount of grants), the recurring cycles of financial crises, and a general lack of direction showed that the Trust could improve the way it did strategic management.

In its first decade (1971-1981), the Trust may have done well in identifying and developing the Crucible's concept, core competencies, and its mission, but it had not done well in exploiting those core competencies and in managing the processes of marketing (audience development) and finance (non-government sources). As a result, its resources were under-utilised and the Crucible became a financial burden to the government.The second decade (1982-1991) saw "improvements" in the Trust's management, hitting "lower" attendance targets, increasing box office income (average annual growth of 23 percent) and its percentage (from 40 to 50 percent) of total income, and decreasing the growth rate of income from grants (average annual growth dropped from 16 percent from 1971-1981 to 7 percent from 1982-1991) for its operations.

However, the financial burden remained for reasons easy to see: the "strategic" decision to bring down attendance targets made it easy to achieve, and as expenses rose, it was only due to effective lobbying by the Trust in the Arts Council and with Sheffield's local government that the Crucible secured the grants that allowed its financial survival. Balancing accounts and fund-raising could be