Weirdly enough, I find that fast-paced and slow-paced can be combined into an annoying hybrid I'll just call "unpaced." An unpaced organization has a hurry-up-and-wait mentality about decisionmaking, but once a decision has been made -- inevitably, right before a big delivery deadline has come and gone -- everyone is sent into an unnecessary crunch mode: the aptly named "fire drill."

Nine times out of ten, if you're at a company with a lot of fire drills, it's because somebody a few levels above you isn't managing timelines appropriately, or some folks at that level just aren't talking to each other. Point is, the "fast-paced" moments are usually symptoms of a deeper issue.