Us
Why Pentagram?
The pentagram is an ancient symbol: we believe an appreciation of human history is key to understanding the threats Australia faces today.
For the ancient Greeks the pentagram embodied the ‘golden ratio’ of mathematical perfection seen in nature: a symbol of harmony, of unifying disparate parts. The Babylonians saw the pentagram as a protection against evil.
In the Middle Ages the pentagram was a powerful symbol of protection, encapsulating knightly virtues and ideals including truth, honour and nobility of spirit. In the Renaissance the pentagram was viewed as a representation of mankind with the top point representing the human spirit presiding over the elements of nature – earth, air, fire, water.
Today Pentagram Advisory means protection. We seek to draw on the attributes of people, marshalling the resources available to them, to protect what is valuable and important to them, their enterprise, and to the Australian community. Pentagram’s meaning is aligned to us, jointly and as individuals
Tim + Marina
Tim Slattery
Director and Co-founder
Founding Pentagram is the logical destination for the long journey I have been on.
My working life started in 1982 as an officer cadet at the Royal Military College at Duntroon. The years I enjoyed at Duntroon, and subsequent service as a commissioned officer in the Artillery and Intelligence corps, helped shape my view on the world and gave me tools to navigate it. The world is a tough place: those of us born in Australia probably do not know how fortunate we are. And the world today is a product of its history: we need to know our history so we can understand our today and envisage our tomorrow.
To help navigate me through the world I took from Duntroon key lessons: need to identify a clear objective, creating a realistic plan, resilience – dealing with setbacks, the fundamental importance of people and teamwork, listening and absorbing feedback, timely decision making, keeping ethics and morality in clear sight, the value of living in a democracy, and my commitment to Australia.
I applied these learnings to the decades of my employment in Army, Defence, Australian Signals Directorate, Department of Foreign Affairs, Attorney-General’s Department, and Australian Federal Police working in Australia, and overseas, with foreign security partners. I have devoted 37 years of my working life to promoting Australia’s national security in many roles across those agencies, 13 years of that as a senior executive officer.
I retired from government service in 2019 and in 2020 started work in the private sector as a consultant. Since 2020 my focus has been advising government and private sector agencies on how best to secure their assets and operations. From 2022, I have been increasingly focused on contributing to the security of Australia’s critical infrastructure and making any contribution I can to Australia’s sovereign capability.
Founding Pentagram enables me to follow my passion to bolster Australia’s national capability, social cohesion and sovereignty. I hope you will join me on that journey.
Marina Shteinberg
Director and Co-founder
Hi! My name is Marina and here is the best attempt to introduce a real human behind the words, share with you who I really am, what passion do we share with Tim and how we can help you.
I was born in Lviv, Ukraine and have been living in Australia for the past 20 years. Happy mother of three sons, a professional translator, love books, wildlife photography, yoga and exploring other parts of the world.
To you and Pentagram, I bring 25 years of experience in various government and industry sector roles in Australia and overseas.
I am an experienced executive and highly qualified professional with degrees in law, foreign affairs, economics, project management, government, and translation. In the last nine years, I started to follow my interest in human nature, psychology, organisational culture, personnel security and insider threat mitigation. In addition to ongoing psychological studies, I am a Critical Pathway to Insider Risk Advanced Practitioner.
Over 12 years, I worked for the Commonwealth government in various policy, regulatory and legislative roles related to national security. For the past three years, I provided advice on the security of critical infrastructure across a variety of industry sectors including electricity, energy, water, oil and gas, airports, telecommunications, hospitals. I have intrinsic knowledge and understanding of people, culture, leadership, business and what it takes to succeed in any environment.
Alongside Tim, a co-founder of Pentagram and our trusted partners, we are driven by a shared passion for protecting Australia, its national interests and empowering leaders to navigate complex challenges in securing critical infrastructure. We like to find unseen and practical solutions to your challenges, offer innovative ideas, enable integration of security and risk management into business management systems.
We also like bringing people together, therefore, we have created a Community of Practice to collaborate, and share information, knowledge and best practice.
Let’s embark on this journey together, where our expertise meets your vision, to achieve extraordinary outcomes and protect Australia!
