Obama's CEO: Jim Messina Has a President to Sell

[teflep]

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 (AAPL), Facebook (FB), Zynga (ZNGA), Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Salesforce (CRM), and DreamWorks (DWA). “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.
In two long, private conversations, Steve Jobs tore into Messina for all the White House was doing wrong and what it ought to be doing differently, before going on to explain how the campaign could exploit technology in ways that hadn’t been possible before. “Last time you were programming to only a couple of channels,” Jobs told him, meaning the Web and e-mail. “This time, you have to program content to a much wider variety of channels—Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube (GOOG), Google—because people are segmented in a very different way than they were four years ago.” When Obama declared for president, the iPhone hadn’t been released. Now, Jobs told him, mobile technology had to be central to the campaign’s effort. “He knew exactly where everything was going,” Messina says. “He explained viral content and how our stuff could break out, how it had to be interesting and clean.”


At DreamWorks Studios, Steven Spielberg spent three hours explaining how to capture an audience’s attention and offered a number of ideas that will be rolled out before Election Day. An early example of Spielberg’s influence is RomneyEconomics.com, a website designed by the Obama team to tell the story—a horror story, by their reckoning—of Mitt Romney’s career at Bain Capital. Afterward, Spielberg insisted that Messina sit down with the DreamWorks marketing team. Hollywood movie studios are expert, as presidential campaigns also must be, at spending huge sums over a few weeks to reach and motivate millions of Americans.

A certain awestruck tone surfaces when Messina talks about these encounters and what they taught him. At 42, he is tall and slightly stooped, with an innocent face, a flop of blonde hair, and a sheepdog friendliness made somewhat surreal by the arsenal of profanity he deploys when not speaking for the record. Messina, who’s from Denver, managed his first campaign as an undergraduate at the University of Montana and in the 20 years since has never lost a race. Before joining Obama in 2008, he alternated between running campaigns and working on Capitol Hill. He made his name as chief of staff to Senator Max Baucus of Montana, becoming known as “Baucus’s muscle” for his skill as a behind-the-scenes enforcer. In 2005 he ran the Democrats’ successful pushback against George W. Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security. “He had a talent for getting K Street to see that it was to their advantage to get on board with whatever Baucus was doing,” says Jim Manley, a former top aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. At the White House, Messina helped cut the deal with the pharmaceutical industry that cleared the way for the health-care reform law.

Messina is unusual in Washington, at once a hard-bitten political fixer known for handling unpleasant tasks—“In the White House he was given all the, pardon my French, the s–t work,” says Baucus—and also earnestly devoted to self-improvement in a way few Washington operatives would want revealed. A sign on his old computer in Baucus’s office, hung with no evident irony and left there by the staff as a token of fondness, reads, “Be Better Today Than You Were Yesterday.”

Along with his conversations with CEOs, Messina’s regimen for the new job included reading a hundred years’ worth of campaign histories piled on a shelf above his desk. But his obsession runs to the future, not the past, and to business as much as politics. Messina is convinced that modern presidential campaigns are more like fast-growing tech companies than anything found in a history book and his own job like that of the executives who run them. “What they’ve done is more readily applicable to me, because they all started very small and got big very quickly,” he says.
www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/30696-obamas-ceo-jim-messina-has-a-president-to-sell

[MrsAxilla]

Jun 15, 2012 11:50:58 GMT -5 teflep said:

.When Obama declared for president, the iPhone hadn’t been released. ”

Wow. I can't believe that!

[PinkSquirrel]

Jun 15, 2012 11:53:30 GMT -5 MrsAxilla said:

Jun 15, 2012 11:50:58 GMT -5 teflep said:

.When Obama declared for president, the iPhone hadn’t been released. ”

Wow. I can't believe that!

That's probably because it's not true. The original iphone was announced in January 2007 and released in June 2007. Obama didn't become President until 2009 (delcared president in late 2008). While yes, the iphone was still new, it was out and by the time of the election the second gen iphone had been out for 4 months.

[PinkSquirrel]

Ok reading comprehension fail. They're saying when he declared he was going to run for president ... which was Feb 2007, so yes, that's true, but it's still somewhat misleading since that was almost 2 years before he was elected.

[MrsAxilla]

My point is that I can barely remember life before my iPhone. 2007, 2008, whatever.