Jim Prevor's Perishable Pundit

"we failed to anticipate pearl harbor not for want of the relevant materials but because of a plethora of irrelevant ones." — roberta wohlstetter pearl harbor: warning and decision roberta wohlsetter won the bancroft prize, the highest honor a historian can win, for her exhaustive study of the run up to pearl harbor. her conclusion, highlighted above, was that there was so much "noise" — so much irrelevant, incorrect or misleading information, that the important information was ignored or misinterpreted. this dilemma is known to historians as "the roberta wohlsetter problem," and it applies to business decisions just as well as military intelligence. our job here at perishablepundit.com is to ease the problem for executives by mining the information super-highway to select what is truly important to know and to provide insight as to its meaning and significance. perishablepundit.com is dedicated to three propositions: 1. first, that perishables are, and for the foreseeable future will