Twenty-three thousand Americans not working or underemployed isn’t cool, you know what’s cool? ……Twenty-three million Americans not working or underem– Wait a minute, that’s not right.

The memorable scene from The Social Network comes to mind when reading the eyebrow-raising new report in Bloomberg Businessweek which reveals that Obama campaign manager Jim Messina draws inspiration from an eclectic group of outside-the-beltway thinkers in technology and entertainment. David Plouffe’s 2008 job managing the Obama campaign is a tough act to follow, especially with a first term record that many believe the president can’t run for reelection on. To learn more about organizational growth, emerging technologies and marketing, Messina spent a month before the campaign took off to meet with CEOs and senior executives at companies that included Apple, Facebook, Zynga, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce and DreamWorks to guide him to a hopeful victory in 2012.

Speaking now from Chicago campaign headquarters, Messina tells Businessweek that Steve Jobs told him to make mobile technology central to the campaign, Steven Spielberg spent three hours explaining to him how to capture an audience’s attention, Anna Wintour told him to raise millions with Obama-branded fashion. The piece is as much a profile of Messina’s pre-Obama background as it is an interesting look into the campaign manager’s tech start-up curriculum to prepare for his biggest job yet.

An interesting nugget from the piece is the revelation that RomneyEconomics.com, was influenced by Steven Spielberg as a website designed by the Obama team to tell the story—a horror story—of Mitt Romney’s career at Bain Capital.