Pursue Security Excellence

We think that the best way to succeed in a security career is to pursue excellence every day, regardless of whether you’re already in your dream security job or just starting out.

The pursuit of excellence may sound like a lofty or vague term, but you can make a difference every day by doing the following:

Do your best job daily. No matter what you do for a living, be the very best at it.

Maintain a positive outlook. Happiness and job satisfaction are due in large part to your attitude. Having a good attitude helps make each day better and helps you to do a better job. Because optimism is contagious, your positive outlook will encourage your co-workers, and pretty soon everyone will be whistling, humming, or whatever they do when they like their jobs.

Improve yourself. Take the time to read about security practices, advances, developments, and changes in the industry. Try to figure out how innovation in the industry can help you and your organization reduce risk even more, with less effort.

Understand your value. Take the time to understand how your work adds value to the organization and try to come up with more ways to add value and reduce risk.

Understand the security big picture in your organization. Whether or not you’re responsible for some aspect of security, take the time to understand the principles that your organization uses to increase security and reduce risk. Use the security and risk management principles in Chapter 6, and see how those principles can help improve security even more. Think about the role you can play in advancing the cause of asset and information protection in your organization.

If you make the pursuit of excellence a habit, you can slowly change for the better over time. You end up with an improved security career, and your organization gets better security and reduced risk.