Some thoughts on:

The company

The company exists to make a profit. It does not exist to provide employment or even to manufacture goods or deliver services. Employment is a necessary prerequisite to making a profit. Output is simply the mechanism by which profit is made.

Employment

Employees do not have a right to a job.

Employees must, at all times, conduct their business in order to actively benefit the companies prime reason for existence - making a profit. Everything an employee does should either directly contribute toward the companies' profit or should support reduction of cost, thereby indirectly maximising profit.

Integrity and Probity

In the security industry, the highest standards of honesty, probity and integrity are mandatory.People who work in the security industry are relied upon by their customers to be honest and trustworthy and it is a disservice to the entire industry and our customers if this is not the case.

Responsibility

I am responsible for my actions, the actions of those who report to me and ultimately but indirectly the actions of those who report to those who report to me. I am similarly responsible for my own performance and that of my team. Provided I have the support of my superiors I freely accept these responsibilities as part of my job function.

Work

Get out of my way and let me get on with it.
Do not present me with a list of reasons why something cannot be done.
Present me with a list of what has been done to get around the problems encountered in doing something.
If necessary present me with a list of things needed so that these can be confirmed and authorised.
If authorisation cannot be obtained then get on with the work and get the job done.
I work hard and I will work long hours wherever necessary but I am the first to recognise that this is not always enough.
Work must be EFFECTIVE otherwise hard work and long hours can often be wasted.

Best Advice

It is incumbent within any specialist industry for professional advisers to give BEST advice to those that the industry serves who would not have the same levels of experience and knowledge.

The notion of best advise does not conflict with the profit motive but complements it. By providing what is genuinely BEST advise for the customer, sometimes (but under control) at the expense of what is best for the company customers tend to return with more and more business.

Customers understand that companies must make profit but customers do not like to feel or perceive that they exist only to serve the companies profit contrary to what is also beneficial to themselves.

Quality

A true measure of quality is where one can open one's work up to someone who has a vested interest in criticising it, at any time and without any notice, safe in the knowledge that there is nothing of any substance to be criticised.

Other People (Experts)

There are many people in the UK who profess to be security experts. Like all demographic groups, this is a mixed bunch. There are the true stars of consulting, who are highly productive, producing system designs of a good quality at affordable costs, well, affordable by consultant standards standards. At the other end of the scale, there are those who, if a register of professional advisors existed, would be struck off it.

There's little doubt that the standard among freelancers is higher, largely because many of us have to prove ourselves over and over again, starting from scratch to rebuild our reputation with every new client. But you will have no doubt come across many contractors who are faking it. The fact that you know the rules of chess, doesn't make you a chess player. Just because you know how to write a program, create a database or design a security system does not mean you can call yourself a consultant or that you are competent to advise the unwary.

Having worked with many experts I've been privileged to see some of the best, and unlucky enough to have crossed paths with some of the worst. What's striking is that quite often the worst experts have more confidence in their abilities than the better ones, who constantly question and challenge themselves, which is one of the reasons they're better in the first place. An unconscious incompetent is someone who doesn't know enough to know that they're rubbish. The auditions for The X Factor are crammed with people who seem quite oblivious to the fact that they can't sing.>

Part of the cause of this lack of self-awareness is the secrecy that surrounds many projects. According to the accepted statistics, most projects either fail or are severely compromised in terms of time, scope, quality and cost. But organisations, understandably, don't shout about their failures from the rooftops. Indeed, many people never really find out that the project they just worked on failed. It appears that nobody has the heart to tell them.

I suspect that if we were more open about our performance, the average standard would start to rise as we feel the pressure from competing teams who are just that much better than us. Benchmarking is a great way to find out where you stand in the grand scheme of things. How much work can you deliver in a month? What does it cost to deliver it? How good is the work that gets delivered? Surprisingly, these things aren't too hard to measure, and yet the vast majority of suppliers and customers never do. I welcome such measurement as the results, good or bad, provide a point to work from either as a point to improve from or an independent validation of one's own perception of one's ability and worth.