Cotton Executive Spends 200 Days a Year on the Road. Here's Why

By Grace Kim

Nearly 200 days a year. That's how much time Liz Hershfield, executive director of COTTON USA and co-director of the U.S. Cotton Trust Protocol, spends traveling to farms, mills, factories, brand headquarters and trade meetings since she entered the cotton industry.

Her argument, laid out in a recent first-person essay: leaders who form opinions without meeting the people doing the work miss the complexity of their decisions. In a global economy, she writes, "a global mindset is table stakes."

A single garment tells the story. Cotton can pass through farms, gins, mills, factories, brands and retailers across half a dozen countries before it reaches a closet, Hershfield notes. Each stop answers to different regulations, cultures and incentives. A decision made at one point in the chain ripples through all the others.

The takeaway in plain words: distance distorts judgment.

Why can't expertise replace presence?

Hershfield has worked both the brand and manufacturing sides of the industry. Her conclusion cuts against the instinct most executives bring into a meeting: assume the market in front of you operates differently than the one you know, "because it usually does."

A retailer, a grower, a manufacturer and a brand can sit in the same conversation while working from very different realities, she writes. Understanding those differences takes more than mastery of your own slice of the business.

The leaders who do best, in her experience, ask the second and third question instead of stopping at the first. Doing that in person adds what a slide deck can't: you see how people work and grasp the challenges behind their answers.

Hershfield's own turning point came early. The first time she visited a cotton farm, she realized how incomplete her understanding was. Talking directly with producers challenged assumptions she had internalized from a distance.

The takeaway: you can't out-expert a room you don't understand.

What does travel do that reports can't?

Sustainability priorities, consumer expectations and market conditions are all shifting — but not at the same speed or in the same direction everywhere, Hershfield writes. A trend line in a report tells you something is changing. It doesn't tell you why it matters more in one place than another.

Travel through the cotton supply chain gave her a firsthand view of that unevenness:

• A grower thinks about weather and crop yield.
• A manufacturer thinks about labor and productivity.
• A brand thinks about a consumer several steps removed from both.

"These realities are true at once, but none is fully visible from a distance," she writes.

Travel is often the first expense cut when budgets tighten. Hershfield calls that a mistake. A few days of face-to-face conversations can accomplish what might otherwise take weeks of emails and meetings, she argues — and it lets decision-makers see how choices made at headquarters land on the people who carry them out.

She lived the trade-off. Early in her career on the brand supply chain side, her teams regularly traveled with buying and merchandising colleagues. As budgets tightened, trips narrowed to production teams only, who were expected to carry insights back to the corporate office. "But secondhand insight rarely has the same impact as firsthand experience," she writes.

It's easy to request a last-minute change from a spreadsheet. It feels very different after standing on a factory floor and seeing what that change requires — or what a canceled order means for the people whose livelihoods depend on producing it.

Later, when she controlled budgets, Hershfield deliberately spent part of her allocation so merchants and buyers could travel alongside production colleagues. The effect, she says, was remarkable. Even one trip changed how people made future decisions — they weighed the people on the other side, and they spotted when a short-term benefit masked a larger long-term risk.

The takeaway: proximity is a budget line, not a perk.

How do relationships function as infrastructure?

After nearly three decades working across industries and markets, Hershfield ranks relationships among the most valuable assets a leader can build.

Business often treats relationships as transactional. Success in long-term ones can't work that way, she writes. Her travels built connections across countries and industries, and those connections create chances to learn, collaborate and solve problems together. One introduction leads to another, linking people who would otherwise never cross paths.

The most effective leaders create connections between others — introducing people with complementary expertise and helping partnerships develop across regions and sectors.

That matters structurally in cotton. No single company controls the supply chain from seed to shelf, Hershfield points out. Progress depends on people who don't report to each other finding reasons to trust one another. "That kind of trust is built by showing up — repeatedly, in person, with the only agenda being to understand," she writes.

The takeaway: in a fragmented chain, trust is the operating system.

What's the leadership lesson?

As business globalizes, leadership means bringing people together across cultures and experiences, Hershfield writes. Her advice to leaders: stay curious, invest in meaningful relationships, and create connections that extend beyond a single meeting or market.

For supply chain executives weighing where to trim travel spend next budget cycle, Hershfield's three decades of field time offer a countervailing data point — the trips you cut may be the ones informing your best decisions.