How Obama’s campaign manager Jim Messina is using technology and advice from high-profile mentors to prepare for November:
“The day after Jim Messina quit his job as White House deputy chief of staff last January, he caught a plane to Los Angeles, paid a brief visit to his girlfriend, and then commenced what may be the highest-wattage crash course in executive management ever undertaken. He was about to begin a new job as Barack Obama’s campaign manager, and being a diligent student with access to some very smart people, he arranged a rolling series of personal seminars with the CEOs and senior executives of companies that included Apple, Facebook, Zynga, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, and DreamWorks. ‘I went around the country for literally a month of my life interviewing these companies and just talking about organizational growth, emerging technologies, marketing,’ he says at Obama’s campaign headquarters in Chicago.”