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Three Ways to Keep the Dream Alive

Career getting too predictable? We profile three security execs who found ways to keep their jobs exciting and their careers moving forward.

By Scott Berinato

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But what could this have to do with security? Nothing, specifically, Baines says. What does it have to do with his security career, one in which he's never been unhappy? Everything.

Baines's security career is peripatetic. He's never been a CSO, exactly, but he's always worked at the highest levels of security, first as a special operations and intelligence officer in the military. He earned degrees in law, economics and political science. After that, he was senior program manager for Initiatives in Security and Infrastructure Protection at the National Lab. Then he started a security law practice that focused on many corporate security issues, notably human resources issues around hiring in classified settings (such as a National Lab).

Along the way Baines also got his PI license and was certified in forensic consulting. And while practicing law, he's also consulted for a company that trains personnel across the gamut of security functions, from corporate security to armed escort, hostage containment, crowd control, even electronic crimes. He does investigations and analysis for cargo/transportation clients as well as several federal agencies.

For Baines, 68, every job has been something of a dream. And he attributes his happiness, in part, to efforts he made to educate himself beyond security. Efforts like his Friday lunches with physicists. "Each time I took on a new security challenge," he says, "it was somehow dependent upon what I learned and picked up someplace else."

Increasingly, Baines believes, security professionals set off on a career that is narrow and disengaged from other disciplines. Even within general MBA programs, he sees a kind of market efficiency at work whereby all problems have templated solutions, and it's a matter of memorizing those templates that puts one on a career track. But, he says, that works against the prospects for long-term job satisfaction in security.

"If you lock yourself into saying I am a security officer, and that's what I need to know about, you're going to cut yourself off from a lot of opportunities," says Baines.

Worse, you probably won't excel without some broader education. For example, right now, Baines says, "what's got me turned on is comparative religion. All of the stuff going on, the conflicts between the West and the Middle East, between Israel and Palestinians, it's about the cultural context of religion." What's that got to do with security? "Say your company operates in that world. You better be able to react not just from assumption about what it's like there, but from real knowledge. You better know what's going on. I first learned this in special ops and intel."