Pearl Harbor by Roberta Wohlstetter: Signals, Noise, Unimaginable/Improbable?, Entrepreneurship and Japanese Thinking

Originally published in the early 60s, RW accounts for the surprise of PH by the noise that overwhelms the signals. Retrospectively, all is clear. Prospectively or in actual time, all those breadcrumbs are mixed in with crumbs from seven other bakeries and a thousand passersby.

Just because something is unimaginable does not mean that it is improbable, is the message in Schelling's forward.

My take is about entrepreneurship: You have an idea, and figure that you must succeed in something like two years. You feel that if you don't pursue it, you have lost your mojo. You also know that your competitors will doom you if you don't succeed in those two years, for they might well catch up. You will make your major announcement now, for you are ready--and you tell yourself that the competitors might cede some of the market to you. But that is just telling yourself. But that uncertain longer term is not going to stop you from trying. In other words, you don't think in terms of real options.  

(Japan is the entrepreneur; the competition is US, UK, the Dutch; the idea is the Greater Asian Prosperity Sphere; the announcement is PH (albeit you have made earlier announcements, as in Manchuria, but no real competition is present then); mojo is Japanese honor and also the anti-mojo is Japan becoming a tenth-rate power, unable to follow the West's imperialist model (the UK is also a small island state); catching up is awakening the US's industrial military might; you are ready since you have extended the range of your bombers to 450 miles but really need 500 miles and hope the pilots are careful with their fuel, the torpedos have been adapted to PH's low-depth; and no one really thinks through what might follow if success does not happen in the first year, for to do so is to violate a taboo and to be dishonorable.)