The following appeared as part of an article in a business magazine."A recent study rating 300 male and female Mentian advertising executives according to the average number of hours they sleep per night showed an association between the amount of sleep t

The author of this article attempts to make the case that businesses would benefit from hiring executives who sleep less than 6 hours per night. While this argument may seem sound due to his evidence from a recent study proclaiming an association between the amount of sleep and the success of a company, there are many hidden assumptions that must be addressed in order to believe that a direct relationship exists between a company’s success and lack of sleep of upper management. 

First, the writer states that there is an association between the average amount of sleep and the success of their firms.  What is missing along side this piece of evidence is more evidence showing that this association is not just a statistically blip, but rather a lead indicator to future trends.  While two arbitrary facts may be associated in a moment of time, this does not conclude that these two things will continue to be connected.  If the assumption that the association between sleep per night and success of a company was just a statistical aberration, then hiring executives based on this fact would prove detrimental in the company’s success because they could have overlooked strong candidates who slept longer than 6 hours. 

In addition, of executives in the advertising firms who had higher profit margins and faster growths compared to companies run by management who slept more than 6 hours, the major gap between this reason and the conclusion is that each of these companies are in the same business stage.  Surely, an advertising agency who brings in billions of dollars per quarter would have higher profit margins than that of a company that was just created and is in deep debt due to initial investments.  Also, the author does not state what faster growth means.  The assumption here is that faster growth is what makes a company prosperous.  But clearly there may be times where fast growth does not lead to the success of a company.  Look at many startups that grow in employee size at an exponential pace, which initially seems positive, but in reality the growth brings profits down because the cost of increasing employees is not below the amount of return each employee brings to the company.  If neither of the companies surveyed were in the same business stage, and if faster growth did not always lead to prosperity for a company, then one cannot draw the same conclusion that the author made in this article. 

As it currently stands, the write assumes that association is always an indicator for the future trends, that each surveyed company is exactly the same financially, and that faster growth always leads to success of a company.  Without further evidence, the overall argument that this writer concluded with could lead to wasteful practices by only hiring executives who sleep less than 6 hours per night and would overlook diligent and adept executives who could in fact help bring a company to success.