Stay true to what you believe in, be ethical as this is the long way down to success.
Make constant efforts to understand the market directions and be creative in offering services to satisfy your clients needs.
Always voice your professional opinion showing the true facts and help constructing the best decision.
Know your process from within, separate hype from need and myth from reality.
Manage each stream of work in the same way, with the same attention to details and using the same tools your methodology employs.
Recognize the different level of expertise of your workforce and align the process to take this into account.
There is no substitute to estimating and planning.
You always have to understand the process bottlenecks before thinking to propose changes.
When eliminating the blockers, it is better to take in consideration all the policies and processes internal to a company and propose alternate ways to address them. The new policies or processes will not confront the old ones directly, especially when the end result can be perceived as an attack to the people position and status within the organization.
Always analyze and plan for data grow in the designing phase of your system.
Think beyond "just" making a single system run.
It is better to have less features built in a software product but well designed, coded and tested when being limited by time constraint and budget.
Invest time, energy and passion in an idea you believe in; make it known to the decision people at the right time and be patient and follow on it until it came to a resolve.
Always have a person in charge of a project, responsible for creating the project's strategy and follow through with its implementation. It is this person responsibility to be a clear and cool head in the mist of all the chaos.
Do not use your live servers for un-predictable tests that were not tried on lower environments. Always have a backup strategy in case the main one can create problems.