A Quote by Stan Van Gundy

As NBA coach, people get on you. But politics, maybe even more so at the local level, is nasty on a very personal level. I have a thick skin, but I don't want to deal with it.
I think if you worked at the community level in Chicago and then a politician on the South Side of Chicago, and worked at the state level, then you're pretty familiar with all the variations of politics in the African American community and criticisms you may get. If you're not familiar with those or you don't have a thick enough skin to take it, then you probably wouldn't have gotten here.
A coach, especially at a college level - much more at a college or high school level, than at a pro level - you're more of a teacher than an actual coach.
You're all over the place usually with young players. You're trying to manage their emotions and teach them NBA situations. It usually takes months, even years, to learn and recognize NBA situations and then to develop a level of competitiveness that's necessary at this level.
When you're talking with a person at this level of the government, at the very highest level, I think you have to be very discreet because he, President Clinton, is very aware that anything he says publicly can have a profound impact on American politics and on world politics.
We want experts, our finest people. We don't want people that are B level, C level, D level. We have to get our absolute best and the recommendations have to be a combination of defensive technologies tailored to specific agencies and every other discipline involved.
I think that all people that get to a certain level of their celebrity are brands. I accept that. I don't value it in any personal way. I value it as an element of my work. I'm more pragmatic in that sense. I do get very rattled if I don't get enough normalcy in my life. I like solitude. I can't even write music if I'm not isolated.
I remember when I came into the NBA, eighteen years ago, there were maybe nine to twelve international players playing in the NBA. Today we've got more than 85, so that tells you how our game has grown at that level.
That's a dream of mine, to be able to coach at the NBA level.
Numerous studies show that people derive more personal satisfaction and are more productive when they engage at a deeper level. In the past, we did that through live, in-person interactions, but it's more of a challenge for distributed workforces to maintain that level of engagement.
When you're serving at the local level, you have to build strong personal relationships to get things done.
When you're in operations, the best thing you can do at the top level is get the strategy right. You have to get the big ideas right, you have to determine what is the policy, what is the level of effort you're willing to commit to it? And then you delegate to those who have to execute that strategy to the appropriate level. What's the appropriate level? It's the level where people are trained and equipped to take decisions so we move swiftly against the enemy.
In Newark, we see a problem and want to seize it, but we run up against the wall of state government, the wall of federal government that does not have the flexibility or doesn't see problems, even. At the federal level, it's often a zero-sum game: If you win, I lose. At the local level, it's just not local that. It's win-win-win.
Winning teams at the NBA level, the college level, and the high school level all play team basketball. Championship teams have five players on the same page at all times.
Politics is so personal, vicious and immediate, how are you going to get anything done? Even the local politics where I live have gotten so ugly.
Even the small amount of infamy I have makes me uncomfortable - on a personal level and on a professional level.
There's much more we can be doing in Parliament, we could be giving more power back to people at local government level, through local referendums.
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