The five attributes of greatness below are observable behaviors that successful Eight Sleep employees have and use to operate at peak performance every day.

1. 💡 Clarity of Thinking (what to do, in what order, and why)

   We leverage frameworks, data and writing to support and present our strategies and decisions. We are obsessed with focus and prioritization, and we are constantly looking for high leverage activities to work on.

2. ⚙️ Operational Excellence (quality and efficiency)

   We focus on clarity, alignment and outstanding efficiency to operate like an oiled machine. We operate at peak performance, we are detail oriented and proud to achieve more with less.

3. 🚀 Bias for Immediate Action (velocity)

   We compress cycle times in everything we do, while maintaining operational excellence. We fix problems as soon as they arise and we understand velocity is a superpower of the greatest startups.

4. 🎖️Talent Captain (world class team)

   We aim to be in the top 1% of the world at what we do, we hire only world class talent, and we help our people become elite professionals in their field. The team we build is the company we build.

5. 📈 Bar Raiser (self improvement)

   We are driven to get better every day and achieve more than what we originally believed was possible. We look for constant feedback from peers and managers and each quarter we want to be better than the previous.

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   Clarity of Thinking

   Below is a list of operating principles to help ingrain the “Clarity of Thinking” attribute in day-to-day activities.

   • 📖  Gather information

     • Spend time gathering info to make the right decisions at tough times.
     • You need to be able to make decisions with 80% of the information.
     • Have your team create weekly written reports.
     • In meetings, focus on the problem first, do not jump into solutions too quickly. Once you start pulling a problem apart, the perspective often changes the range of possibilities.
     • Have dashboards about everything and show them continuously to your team.

   • ✍️ Write

     • One great way to consistently receive information and clarify people’s thinking is to have your team create weekly written reports.
     • By writing, you are forced to clarify your exact thinking, and it surfaces logical fallacies. Most of the benefit actually accrues to the writer who is forced to clarify their thoughts, as opposed to the reader.
     • Examples
       • “When any of our founders and executives are preparing their board decks for a meeting, they almost always end up discovering something about their business in the process of digging into their metrics.” - Keith Rabois

   • 📊  Set clear KPIs

     • Simplify metrics to a few key indicators.
     • Indicators must be early predictors of your team’s eventual output.
     • Look for anomalous data. Anomalous data is the way you discover and have epiphanies about the future.

   • ☯️  Set opposite metrics

     • Have competing metrics to prevent over-optimization of a single goal. When you measure one thing the company tends to optimize towards that - often at the expense of something else.
     • Examples
       • “An example is fraud rates at Paypal. It's easy for the risk team to lower the fraud rate by treating every user as a suspect. Then you have the lowest fraud rate in the world, you also have the lowest level of customer satisfaction score. In this example, you want to pair the fraud rate with your false positive rate. This forces the team to innovate.” - Keith Rabois
       • Other examples are YoY growth vs contribution margin, pairing the number of interviews with the quality of people being interviewed or quality vs speed.

   • 🦾  Solve the most important problems first, even if they’re hard

     • Identify the biggest possible problems and solve them in the order that's most fatal to you (or that has the biggest outsize impact).
     • People tend to tackle problems that are easier rather than harder. Go in the reverse order.
     • Framework
       • What are the three most difficult things that can interfere between now and the point of success? Tackle the hardest one first, then the second hardest one, then the third hardest one.

   • 🔩  Focus on the inputs, not the outputs

     • Your output is a derivative of your inputs.
     • See yourself as a function of your inputs to achieve the optimal output.
     • If you focus on outputs, then your best people will tackle short-term projects that they know will drive outputs.
     • Managing on inputs and clarity of thinking will empower your best people to focus on projects that have the highest potential upside, even if they are risky and totally flop.
     • If you get all the details right, the score will take care of itself.

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     Operational Excellence

     Below is a list of operating principles to help ingrain the “Operational Excellence” attribute in day-to-day activities.

   • 🏆  The role of a leader

     • The role of a leader is to change the status quo, step up the pace, and increase the intensity.
     • Leaders are the energizer bunnies and pacemakers of the organization.
     • As a leader, you look for and exploit every single opportunity to step up the pace, set a higher bar for quality, and narrow the plane of attack.

   • 🚴‍♂️  Lead, don’t manage

     • “Be stubborn on the vision and flexible on the details.” - Jeff Bezos
     • Be proactive and “lead” your team, rather than being reactive and “managing” a situation.
     • You are judged as a leader by your ability to drive output. Yes, unexpected situations will come up, but that should not be your primary modus operandi.
     • Framework
       • Think of yourself as a producer and a leader driving value, not as a manager. Calling yourself a manager implies some level of reactivity. You manage unexpected situations. You lead to ideal outcomes. You want to be active versus reactive. You want to be driving the vehicle versus a passenger observing.

   • 📈  Output formula

     • Your output = the output of your team + the output of neighboring teams under your influence.
     • Spend time evaluating your team’s inputs and help your team increase the quality and quantity of their inputs.

   • ⚙️  Managerial Leverage (efficiency)

     • Efficiency is related to the size of your team and number of core initiatives they perform.
     • Your efficiency as an executive = # of core initiatives / # of team members
     • To increase efficiency, focus on high leverage activities + number of barrels in your team.
     • You need barrels to run core initiatives and ammunition to support them (see barrels & ammunition section below).
     • Great execution is better than great strategy. No strategy is better than its execution.
     • See “Efficiency Scenarios” section below for examples of bad, mediocre, and great efficiency within organizations.
     • Examples
       • As a product leader, you are primarily responsible for the pace of product releases and updates. You also have a heavy influence on the output of customer support. Most of the customers that write in do so because of a flaw in the product. Your total output as a leader is both product releases and decreasing the number of tickets due to product flaws.
     • Framework
       • You are judged as a leader on how many people you need on your team to achieve your output, i.e. your managerial leverage. How much are you able to do with as few people as possible? Track opposite metrics on achieving as much as possible with as few resources as possible.

   • 🎯  Focus on high leverage activities

     • To maximize your Managerial Leverage, focus on the areas that have the greatest influence on output.
     • To encourage and excite people to work on 10X projects, you have to be able to assess them based on the creativity and clarity of thinking that they put into the initiative, not whether the initiative actually achieves the 10X.
     • Spend a lot of time preparing things that affect many, like all-hands and dashboards.
     • Spend a lot of time preparing things that have a lot of impact on a single performance, like performance reviews. Be precise and candid in your feedback. It can have a massive long-term effect on an individual.
     • Examples
       • At Square, Keith would spend at least 5 hours every week preparing for his presentations at the all-hands meeting on Fridays. That might seem like an inordinate amount of time to spend on a weekly presentation, however if he was able to communicate a single idea that affected how everyone at the company made decisions, then it was absolutely worth it.
       • Another example in this category is creating your team’s dashboards. Obsessing over the exact layout, font choice, graph types, and colors might seem extreme. However, if it is the dashboard your team looks at every morning when they start work, and what they base their decisions off of, it is critical that it is perfect.
       • In his first few months at PayPal, Reid Hoffman sat Keith down and told him that Peter Thiel didn’t think Keith was quantitative enough when making arguments. For the next six months, Keith made sure to include metrics in all of his arguments and still thinks about that feedback 16 years later. Being both precise and incredibly candid in your feedback to a single individual can have a massive, and long-term effect and is a very high leverage use of your time.
     • Framework
       • Think in terms of “zeroes”. If an activity doesn’t have the potential to add a “zero”, then skip it and prioritize something else that does have the potential to add a zero.

   • 🏋️‍♂️ Effort vs impact

     • Look at everything from the lens of effort > impact. Always ask “how do we get the most impact given our limited resources?” Break math, find ways to achieve 1+1=10.

   • ⌛ Time is your most valuable resource

     • Optimize your time properly.
     • Audit your calendar (and your team’s calendar) - categorize how you spend your time. Show your team examples of great calendars.
     • Reserve uninterrupted time to work, build strategies, and prepare things that affect many people (e.g., all-hands presentation).
     • Focus on the limiting step in your top priorities (see examples below).
     • To be a great executive, you need to reserve time for making and thinking. You have to reserve long, uninterrupted time on your calendar to both think deeply about your strategy, but also for when you are preparing things that affect many people, i.e. an all-hands presentation.
     • Spend 80%+ of your time on your top 3 priorities.
     • Examples
       • There are a few tactics from production manufacturing that you can also use to optimize your time. In any manufacturing line, each step of the process has a different total potential throughput, however the throughput of the entire line is always determined by whichever step has the least throughput (i.e. the limiting step). In order to improve the throughput of the entire line, you have to focus all your efforts on improving your limited step. Any effort dedicated to other steps on the line might help you down the line, but aren’t at all important to work on. Identify the limiting step in your top priority and make sure that 20-80% of your time is dedicated to working on it.
       • Another tactic from manufacturing you can use is to batch together similar tasks, for example doing all of your 1:1s back to back on the same day. Mostly because context switching is incredibly costly for most people. Paul Graham actually discusses this best in Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.

   • 📝 Edit, do not draft

     • As you grow as a leader and scale your team, you must spend most of your time editing instead of drafting.
     • If you are a senior leader and this is not happening, it means you are not scaling your team enough, or your team is sub par or too small. Either way, your approach is not working.
     • Editors take out a red pen, eliminate useless words and phrases, and omit things that aren’t important. That’s your job too.
     • The end goal of editing is to simplify and raise questions. If you are doing a good job, you will be using less red ink every day.

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     Bias for Immediate Action (velocity)

     Below is a list of operating principles to help ingrain the “Bias for Immediate Action” attribute in day-to-day activities.

   • 🔎  Narrow the focus

     • The fastest way to move a dial is to narrow the focus. People naturally resist focus because they can’t decide what is important. When you narrow the focus, you are increasing resources on the remaining priorities.
     • Focus applies at the individual level. As you add more barrels, you can let each of them be focused on different programs and expand the number of initiatives you can attack with high velocity.
     • Be obsessed with focus and prioritization. Work on fewer things at the same time, and prioritize hard. Keep asking “what are we not going to do?”

   • 👌 Simplicity

     • Force yourself to simplify every initiative down to 1-4 things.
     • The more you simplify, the better people will perform.
     • Don’t accept the excuse of complexity.
     • Ask clarifying questions - what are the 1-4 things that matter the most for this initiative?
     • Andrew Grove estimates that every step eliminated improves performance by 30-50%.

   • 🧘  Clarity

     • Tell your team what matters, the priorities, and the guiding philosophies so that your team can react instinctively and quickly to your goals.
     • Clarity and alignment will increase speed of hiring, problem solving, and personal growth for employees.