The author of the chart at J. P. Morgan is withdrawing it, because, he says, it strove for a simple answer to a complex question, and the simple answer that resulted is “wrong” in his terms — I would say simply misleading.

What sort of business do we really need in our Secretary of Labor, for example? Putting in a company CEO (or finance officer) proved disastrous for labor, for the management of companies that were unioinized, and to the economy.

But what would you have said had Obama picked Rich Trumka for Labor?

Steven Chu is probably the best qualified man in the world to talk jobs and energy right now. You deride his extensive private sector experience — but he is the only cabinet member ever to have won a Nobel prize for his private sector work. Is that not exactly the sort of example we need? Is there not at least the possibility that Nobel-winning scientist might have a good idea? The public was well served by Dick Feynman’s service on the Challenger Shuttle disaster commission.

What we need is someone who can get the job done, and do it right — and in this climate, the job isn’t even well define, let alone the solutions.

Obama’s cabinet is better poised for such turmoil than any other cabinet in history. Look at the wrecks that resulted from business stacked cabinets in Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover and Nixon administrations.

Your claim here is the perfect sort of argument for a party and political philosophy who have nothing but complaints and whines to offer. It sounds bad, though it’s not. It gives some opportunity to bumpkins to complain that these well-qualified men and women are somehow inferior. And it frustrates any rational action to save the nation.

Isn’t the destruction of the American nation what you’re really after?

Then tell us, in detail, what bad decisions have been made in the Obama cabinet, especially that can be laid at the feet of Steven Chu, Gary Lock, Hilda Solis, and Tim Geithner? What was the alternative anyone else offered?

We’ll see what happens if Hershey can get a third party bidder!

In Web development circles, they are frequently held up as a model for iterative development, where they rapidly launch new features and upgrades to the interface. They test them quickly on the live site, keeping what works and throwing away what doesn’t. This has resulted in their site being extraordinarily usable.

While they certainly are in a competitive and changing marketplace, I would see them leveraging this same focus on customer intimacy in whatever direction the business model heads.

Although I do agree with the premise that integrated eletronic medical records are a long ways off at a national level, the reason for that is not due to lack of standards in my opinion. HL7 and HIPAA standards date back to the mid-1990’s. Security protocols capable of safeguarding billions of dollars of commerce via networks and the internet have been around for nearly as long. No, the issue is not lack of standards, it’s lack of agreement on which standards to use, and where the line between public and private gets drawn.

“Health Level Seven is one of several American National Standards Institute (ANSI) -accredited Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) operating in the healthcare arena. Most SDOs produce standards (sometimes called specifications or protocols) for a particular healthcare domain such as pharmacy, medical devices, imaging or insurance (claims processing) transactions. Health Level Seven’s domain is clinical and administrative data. ”

http://www.hl7.org/implement/standards/ansiapproved.cfm