Am back with my second piece of writing. Your advice and vote are much appreciated!


The article recommends that business hire only people who need less than six hours of sleep per night for better success of the company. However, this piece of advice is based on a number of innadequately supported assumptions. Without further information, we are not able to determine the validity of this claim.

Citing the recent study on 300 executives, the report concludes the association between the amount of sleep for executives and the success of their firms. However, the scope and validity of the survey is not clear. The survey only interviews executives of the firms without interviewing staff from all ranks who may have a different lifestyle from the executives, while the recommendation extends to hiring people beyond the top executives. Junior staff may be less incentivised to sleep less and over work as their pay does not justify long hours of work as compared to the executives. The survey may have also interviewed only companies of aggressive working culture who value "working hard" over "working smart". Their business counterparts who value the latter more may possibly have longer hour of sleep to ensure productivity the next working day - these companies can also be equally, if not more, successful. Unless the survey can be truly representative of the whole business world, we cannot conclude the validity of the recommendation based on the survey.

On the premise of the survey result and the observation that executives who sleep less have more profitable and faster growing firms, the company recommended hiring people who sleep less on the basis that lower number of sleep leads to better success of the firm. Even if we are to give the benefit of doubt on the survey validity and agree that there is indeed a correlation between duration of sleep and success of firm, the author is confusing correlation to causation. The shorter duration of sleep may not lead to the success of the company - it may be the other way round. For instance, it is conceivable that the company is so successful and fast growing, teeming with new businesses in the pipeline, that the executives just do not have sufficient time to sleep. Additionally, there could be other factors contributing to the growth and profit of the firm as well: the barrier of entry of the industry, the validity of the business model and the productivity of the operation, just to name a few. Unless these other factors are ruled out, the viewpoint of fewer hours of sleep leading to faster growth and higher profit of the company can be called into question.

More importantly, the article has a relatively narrow definition of the success of a company, which is based on profit margins and business growth. Admittedly, these are two important metrics of a company's success, as a company of higher margin and faster growth is more likely to scale and become the leader of its industry. However, the success of a company is not confined by these two metrics. Other Northstar metrics often cited would include the cash conversion ratio, the employee satisfaction and productivity of the company. It is possible that a company with employees devoting sleep hours to work may have higher growth and better profit in the short run. Nevertheless, in the long run, this may be detrimental to the employee satisfaction and productivity, preventing the company to be successful on a sustainable basis.

In conclusion, unless the gaps mentioned above are addressed, the recommendation of the newsletter to hire only people who need less than six hours of sleep per night to ensure the success of the company fails to be convincing.