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Leadership loves speed. You see it in job postings: Were a fast-paced environment. And you hear it: Decide quickly. Respond ASAP. Fix it… now. And yes, action needs to happen at work. But reacting quickly and leading effectively arent the same thing. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/i-169-Ashley-Herd.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/i-11-Ashley-Herd.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cem\u003EThe Manager Method\u003C\/em\u003E","dek":"Want practical leadership development training that actually sticks? Visit managermethod.com to learn more and order Ashley Herds book, \u003Cem\u003EThe Manager Method\u003C\/em\u003E.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"http:\/\/managermethod.com","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91478992,"imageMobileId":91478994,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} Some of the biggest leadership mistakes dont happen because someones careless. They happen because someone feels pressure to respond immediately and prioritizes urgency over accuracy. Someone makes a mistake and you groan. You hear feedback and go on the defensive before youve even fully heard it. Someone gets sick during a key project and your first thought is, How will this get done now? These moments pass fast, but the ripple effects linger. Thats why leaders can use a simple framework that creates better decisions and better conversations without slowing down the work: Pause-Consider-Act. Not because leaders need to become slower. Because they need to become steadier. Heres how it works. Step 1: Pause (not stop) When leaders hear the word pause, they sometimes picture a dramatic freeze or a long, awkward silence while everyone waits for a decision. Thats not what this is. Pausing isnt stopping. Its creating an opportunity to think before you respond. A pause can be as small as a breath before you speak. It can be a quick reset of your tone and your words. That beat matters because without it, pressure changes the way you lead. Your tone gets sharper. Your patience gets thinner. Your words get shorter. Your brain goes into handle it now mode instead of handle it well mode. Its not a character flawits human. But leadership is the ability to respond without letting stress take the wheel. If you want words to have ready when youre on the spot, try these: I want to make sure I answer this the right way. Let me take a second. It buys you time without creating uncertainty. It signals confidence, not weakness. And it keeps a tense moment from becoming a bigger one. Step 2: Consider (the full picture) When you pause, you have room to consider whats actually happening. Not just the words being said, but whats underneath them. Consider isnt about being soft. Its about being fair and smart. It means running decisions through a simple filter: How would I want to be treated if this were me? Or: How would I a loved one treated in this situation? It doesnt mean you avoid accountability. It means you stop treating people like problems to solve and start treating them like humans to lead. In the Consider step, ask yourself: What might I be assuming that I dont actually know? What outcome am I aiming for here? If this were someone else, would my response be the same? That last question matters more than people want to admit. Because inconsistency is one of the fastest ways to lose trust. Employees can handle tough feedback. What they struggle to handle is unpredictability. Step 3: Act (follow through) Strong leadership action is direct, calm, and specific. Its not vague promises or reassurance. Its saying what needs to be said, without making someone feel uncertain or ashamed in the process. And this is where leaders sometimes slip: they pause, consider… and then never actually act. They avoid the conversationsaying Ill circle back, but never do. Or they soften a message, so its not actually heard. If you want your team to trust you, action has to include follow-through, even if its simple: Heres what Im doing. Heres what I need from you. Heres when well check in again. Clear communication builds trust. And trust is what makes teams more efficient, more resilient, and easier to lead long-term. What this looks like in real leadership moments Pause-Consider-Act matters most in the moments that test you. If someone makes a mistake, instead of groaning or snapping, try: Lets look at what went wrong and how we fix it and from it. If you get feedback, instead of becoming defensive, say: Thank you for telling me. I want to think on that and talk more about it. If someone gets sick during a key project, instead of stress, respond: First, take care of yourself. Well figure out coverage and next steps. Pause-Consider-Act wont make every situation easy. But it gives you a repeatable way to lead reliably, especially when your first instinct is to move fast. Because the leaders who build the most trust arent the fastest to respond. Theyre the ones who know how to pause, consider, and act with intention. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/i-169-Ashley-Herd.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/i-11-Ashley-Herd.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cem\u003EThe Manager Method\u003C\/em\u003E","dek":"Want practical leadership development training that actually sticks? Visit managermethod.com to learn more and order Ashley Herds book, \u003Cem\u003EThe Manager Method\u003C\/em\u003E.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"http:\/\/managermethod.com","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91478992,"imageMobileId":91478994,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
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E-Commerce
Sometimes Warren Buffett says something so simple, so obvious, that you almost want to roll your eyes. At 95 years young, he has offered plainspoken advice that has shaped one of the most successful careers in history. But when you hear it, you know its truth and part of you wonders: Why havent I applied this yet? When we slow down long enough to sit with some of his wisdomreally let it sink in, not just skim it on our phoneshis principles can reshape how we lead, how we work, and how we show up in life. The challenge, of course, is in the follow-through. How many of us can read something today and honestly say, Im going to start doing this tomorrow? If youre feeling even a little inspired, here are six Buffett classics worth putting into practice. Break the habits that hold you back Most of us know exactly whats holding us back. Buffett doesnt sugarcoat it. He once told a group of college grads, I see people with these self-destructive behavior patterns. They really are entrapped by them. His message was simple: Build better habits early, because the longer you wait, the harder it gets. The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken, added Buffett. This is leadership 101. Your people wont rise above the behaviors you tolerate in yourself. Dont gamble what matters most Buffett told those same students that hes watched countless leaders and companies blow up their lives chasing something biggerusually out of greed or impatience. His filter is straightforward: If you risk something that is important to you for something that is unimportant to you, it just doesnt make sense. Leaders often get in trouble not because they lack intelligence, but because they lose perspective. Surround yourself with people who do whats right Buffett asked students to think of the classmate whose long-term success theyd bet on. The qualities theyd identify? Integrity. Humility. Generosity. That would be the person who is generous, honest, and who gave credit to other people for their own ideas, he said. Integrity in the age of liars and narcissists is your competitive advantage. People follow leaders they trust. Stay in the lane where you excel Buffett once quoted Tom Watson Sr., founder of IBM: Im no genius. But Im smart in spots, and I stay around those spots. Leaders get themselves into trouble when they drift too far from their strengths. Know your lane. Build from it. Delegate what sits outside it. That focus is what creates mastery and a career you can be proud of. Build a career you actually love This one feels almost too obvious, but most people ignore it for decades: In the world of business, the people who are most successful are those who are doing what they love, said Buffett. Too many leaders stay in roles that drain them simply because the paycheck feels safe. But when you do work that energizes you, everythingcreativity, resilience, performancegets better. Choose people who raise your standards At a 2004 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, Buffett told a 14-year-old: Its better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and youll drift in that direction. This is one of the most underrated leadership truths. We absorb the standards of the people around us. You want to grow? Surround yourself with leaders who elevate you. When you strip away the mystique around success, Buffetts tips leave us with a clear reminder that it doesnt have to be complicated or grand. Your success is built on small, steady choiceshabits, relationships, focus, integrity. All of it is transformative if you take it seriously. Look back at that list. Now, pick one principle and start practicing it today. Thats how real change happens, for you and for the people you lead. Like this article? Subscribe here for more related content and exclusive insights from executive coach and global speaker Marcel Schwantes. Inc.
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E-Commerce
Pantone’s professional color matching kits can cost anywhere from several hundred dollars to upwards of several thousand dollars for pros who work in industries like fashion and interiors. Its newest, though, is a single-fan book with more than 600 spot colors, and it’s priced at just $99. Pantone for beginners. Pantone on Thursday announced its Pantone Capsule: Signature Edition. Housed in a collectible, cylindrical case that wouldn’t look out of place in a Sephora, the guide is a sort of Pantone 101 that come on coated and uncoated paper stock with colors selected from across more than 60 years of Pantone history. “At Pantone, we have spent a lot of time speaking with our creative community to understand how their roles have changed, the tools they need, and how to best serve them,” Ora Solomon, Pantone’s vice president of product and engineering, said in a statement. “As a result, we wanted to expand the opportunities for our design community to have a more accessible way to use our guides, especially at the beginning of their careers, and help them create with confidence.” [Photo: Pantone] The colors for the collection were chosen for their utility, based on Pantone data about the most popular and widely used colors. There’s Pantone 6104 C, a sapphire blue that’s one of its newest colors, and retro throwbacks, like the bright yellow Pantone 102 C and the purple-pink Pantone 238, which were popular in the 1980s and ’90s. The Pantone capsule represents something of a departure for the color-matching company’s product releases, since it usually adds colors to its existing standard formula guide instead of curating new guides. The idea for it came from Pantone’s creative listening initiative to work directly with creatives in order to improve its products. After being previewed with designers at Adobe Max in October, Pantone says the reaction was enthusiastic. Pantone imagines the guide as a primer on the Pantone Matching System for students and content creators, or a portable companion for freelancers between clients and project. Or even just for fun, since it was designed to be collectible. While Pantone’s business is verifying colors, initiatives likes its long-running Color of the Year and collaborations with celebrities, bands, and brands have made Pantone a popular authority on color. An affordably priced, mobile color-matching starter kit that also happens to look good on a shelf manifests that ethos in a physical, accessible way.
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E-Commerce
Data collected from 35 American cities showed a 21% decrease in the homicide rate from 2024 to 2025, translating to about 922 fewer homicides last year, according to a new report from the independent Council on Criminal Justice.The report, released on Thursday, tracked 13 crimes and recorded drops last year in 11 of those categories including carjackings, shoplifting, aggravated assaults and others. Drug crimes saw a small increase over last year and sexual assaults stayed even between 2024 and 2025, the study found.Experts said cities and states beyond those surveyed showed similar declines in homicides and other crimes. But they said it’s too early to tell what is prompting the change even as elected officials at all levels both Democrats and Republicans have been claiming credit.Adam Gelb, president and CEO of the council a nonpartisan think tank for criminal justice policy and research said that after historic increases in violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, this year brought historic decreases. The study found some cities recorded decades-low numbers, with the overall homicide rate dropping to its lowest in decades.“It’s a dramatic drop to an absolutely astonishing level. As we celebrate it we also need to unpack and try to understand it,” Gelb said. “There’s never one reason crime goes up or down.”The council collects data from police departments and other law enforcement sources. Some of the report categories included data from as many as 35 cities, while others because of differences in definitions for specific crimes or tracking gaps, include fewer cities in their totals. Many of the property crimes in the report also declined, including a 27% drop in vehicle thefts and 10% drop in shoplifting among the reporting cities.The council’s report showed a decrease in the homicide rate in 31 of 35 cities including a 40% decrease or more in Denver, Omaha, Nebraska, and Washington. The only city included that reported a double-digit increase was Little Rock, Arkansas, where the rate increased by 16% from 2024.Gelb said the broad crime rate decreases have made some criminologists question historic understandings of what drives trends in violent crime and how to battle it.“We want to believe that local factors really matter for crime numbers, that it is fundamentally a neighborhood problem with neighborhood level solutions,” he said. “We’re now seeing that broad, very broad social, cultural and economic forces at the national level can assert huge influence on what happens at the local level.”Republicans, many of whom called the decrease in violent crime in many cities in 2024 unreliable, have rushed to say that tough-on-crime stances like deploying the National Guard to cities like New Orleans and the nation’s capital, coupled with immigration operation surges, have all played a role in this year’s drops.However, cities that saw no surges of either troops or federal agents saw similar historic drops in violent and other crimes, according to the Council’s annual report.Democratic mayors are also touting their policies as playing roles in the 2025 decreases.Jens Ludwig, a public policy professor and the Director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, stressed that many factors can contribute to a reduction in crime, whether that’s increased spending on law enforcement or increased spending on education to improve graduation rates.“The fact that in any individual city, we are seeing crime drop across so many neighborhoods and in so many categories, means it can’t be any particular pet project in a neighborhood enacted by a mayor,” Ludwig said. And because the decrease is happening in multiple cities, “it’s not like any individual mayor is a genius in figuring this out.”He said while often nobody knows what drives big swings in crime numbers, the decrease could be in part due to the continued normalization after big spikes in crime for several years during the pandemic. A hypothesis that stresses the declines might not last.“If you look at violent crime rates in the U.S., it is much more volatile year to year than the poverty rate, or the unemployment rate; It is one of those big social indicators that just swings around a lot year to year,” Ludwig said. “Regardless of credit for these declines, I think it’s too soon for anybody on either side of this to declare mission accomplished.” Claudia Lauer, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
A new campaign launches today against AIs sticky fingers on copyrighted material. The Human Artistry Campaigns Stealing Isnt Innovation movement launches today with over 800 signatories. Those include many Hollywood actors, including Scarlett Johansson, Cate Blanchett, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as well as writers such as Jodi Picoult and Roxane Gay, and musicians like Cyndi Lauper and They Might be Giants. The campaign has a simple message: Stealing our work is not innovation. It’s not progress. It’s theftplain and simple. Many record labels, news outlets, and other creative entities have partnered with AI companies in recent years, despiteor possibly in response totheir propensity to mine copyrighted materials. Creatives have fought (and continue to fight) for protections, such as in the lengthy Writers Guild of America (WGA) and Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) strikes in 2023. However, the Stealing Isnt Innovation campaign isnt against AI, it just wants creatives to be part of the process. A better way existsthrough licensing deals and partnerships, some AI companies have taken the responsible, ethical route to obtaining the content and materials they wish to use, the letter reads. It is possible to have it all. We can have advanced, rapidly developing AI and ensure creators’ rights are respected. The Stealing Isnt Innovation campaign will promote itself through ads on social media and in news publications. Creatives in the U.K. have taken comparable action The latest campaign focuses on American creators and takes a bit of a nationalist stance in its opening line: Americas creative community is the envy of the world and creates jobs, economic growth, and exports. But artists across the U.K. have launched similar movements in response to AIs access to copyrighted material, including a law that would require creatives to opt out of letting AI use their work. In February 2025, the Make It Fair campaign ran in hundreds of publications to raise awareness of the threat of AI to creative industries. The same month saw over 1,000 musicians, from Kate Bush to The Clash, release a silent album titled Is This What We Want?with the 12 tracks spelling out: The British government must not legalise music theft to benefit AI companies. In May, creatives across industries took action again. In an open letter to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, everyone from Elton John to Kazuo Ishiguro voiced their opposition to the proposed copyright law. The U.K. government is set to issue policy proposals on the matter in mid-March.
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E-Commerce
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