Day three of the Schwab summit and the pace is quickening as we try to juggle lots of sessions, conversations in the hall with Google, Reuters, and fellow entrepreneurs, and preparation for Davos.

With Peter Gabriel as our co-founder and no WITNESS staff assistance at the Forum, I generally assume the role of press contact for media interviews and we have requests pending for a joint interview live with Al Jazeera English and a Huffington Post interview in Second Life, amongst others. Should be interesting. The challenge is how to take advantage of the opportunity for visibility and exposure of our issues without getting sucked into a media vortex and missing the richness of some of the Forum discussions and seminars.

This year at Davos, there is a much-needed focus on climate collapse (branded more euphemistically) and I want to be sure to get better equipped to understand what is going on and how we can make a difference personally and institutionally. There is I think an increasingly dangerous and arbitrary divide between the environmental and the human rights sectors, especially when you consider how many fundamental human rights and needs are predicated on a healthy environment - whether the right to water, or to means of subsistence, etc. I also always like to pick a couple of sessions on off-beat topics I know nothing about - last year's session on the science behind Out of Body Experiences was a highlight!

Finally, the Skoll Foundation which has supported WITNESS' work financed a Predictive Index survey assessment of my leadership style and personality (they actually did this for all the Skoll award winners here at the Summit). After taking a short web-based test, I was given a remarkably accurate assessment of my leadership style and treated to a lengthy conversation with someone who has been consulting for 25 years in the field. It basically assesses the significance of 4 key characteristics in your personality, namely dominance, patience, formality and extroversion. While I predicted with absolute accuracy how I would rank, the more detailed narrative analysis I was given was very helpful in understanding the types of people I work well with, the kind of institutional climate I have a tendency to create, etc. I look forward to sharing the results with my staff and possibly adding it to the www.strengthsfinder.com analysis all staff do when they arrive. I also think it can be very useful in recruiting candidates for positions because while intuition is a very instructive guide this gives lots of added information. It deepened my belief in the importance of self-knowledge in management....

More later.

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Read Gillian Caldwell's other posts from Switzerland:

Report from Schwab Forum: Cultural Archetypes - January 22, 2007