"It's difficult to do that internally, because you're flying five, six hours"
About this Quote
The line captures the blunt reality of running a business built on relentless travel and live production. Vince McMahon spent decades commanding a touring enterprise that lives on the road, where performers, producers, and executives hop from city to city with tight turnarounds. When he says it is difficult to do that internally, he is pointing to how the basic mechanics of collaboration break down when people are scattered across time zones, airports, and arenas. Internal problem solving thrives on unhurried meetings, shared context, and sustained attention. A schedule that demands five or six hours of flying between commitments constantly steals those conditions away.
Travel time is not just time lost; it is cognitive drag. Fatigue, jet lag, and shifting local demands shrink the bandwidth available for deep work. Creative development, strategic planning, and delicate personnel matters get squeezed into brief windows between flights and rehearsals. Instead of organic, iterative dialogue, teams default to quick decisions, top-down directives, and hard deadlines. McMahon is also implying a structural truth: a road show forces decentralization in practice even if authority is centralized on paper. When the crew is airborne, you cannot easily convene them for the kind of internal process that a stationary company might rely on.
There is another layer: internal capacity is not just people; it is systems. To function amid constant travel, you need robust playbooks, clear hierarchies, and trust in local leaders. If those systems are underdeveloped, geography exposes the weakness. The appeal of outsourcing or leaning on external partners grows because they can dedicate stable, localized attention that the traveling core cannot spare. The remark reads as a seasoned operator acknowledging limits. Ambition collides with logistics, and the solution is not working harder but designing around distance and time, reserving internal bandwidth for the decisions that truly require it and offloading the rest to structures that can withstand the grind.
Travel time is not just time lost; it is cognitive drag. Fatigue, jet lag, and shifting local demands shrink the bandwidth available for deep work. Creative development, strategic planning, and delicate personnel matters get squeezed into brief windows between flights and rehearsals. Instead of organic, iterative dialogue, teams default to quick decisions, top-down directives, and hard deadlines. McMahon is also implying a structural truth: a road show forces decentralization in practice even if authority is centralized on paper. When the crew is airborne, you cannot easily convene them for the kind of internal process that a stationary company might rely on.
There is another layer: internal capacity is not just people; it is systems. To function amid constant travel, you need robust playbooks, clear hierarchies, and trust in local leaders. If those systems are underdeveloped, geography exposes the weakness. The appeal of outsourcing or leaning on external partners grows because they can dedicate stable, localized attention that the traveling core cannot spare. The remark reads as a seasoned operator acknowledging limits. Ambition collides with logistics, and the solution is not working harder but designing around distance and time, reserving internal bandwidth for the decisions that truly require it and offloading the rest to structures that can withstand the grind.
Quote Details
| Topic | Travel |
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