Typical pronouncement to “A new team”?
By Dan Rockwell?
To the new team:
Thank you for accepting a seat at the table. I’m writing to you because you’re young and I’m counting on your new team to lift our organization to new heights.
Learning to work on a team is a powerful opportunity for you. Seize it with gusto. However…
There’s nothing natural about working on teams.
Independence is normal and easy. “Leave me alone and let me work on my own.”
Working together takes work.
Dysfunctional teams – all are dysfunctional at first – frustrate, distract, and de-motivate. Avoid self-destructive behaviors.
On the other hand, team work is your path to maximum, meaningful impact in career and life.
Prepare yourself. All new teams go through four stages.
Stage one – forming: Let’s get to know each other.
Stage two storming: Let’s figure out how to work together.
Know: Storming is normal and necessary. Don’t skip or short-circuit the process.
Warning: Some teams spiral into permanent ineffectiveness during storming.
Stage three and four next time.
Three team-forming tips:
“The more decisions a leader makes, the further he or she is from leading a high-performance team. … Make too many command decisions, and you’ll doom yourself and your team to mediocrity,” Mark Miller in, “The Secret of Teams.”
Everyone serious about success is serious about teams. Great teams lift organizations. Lousy teams drain everyone.
Mark Miller explains three pillars of successful teams.
First, success begins with selection. Every member must possess, “Attitude and aptitude for the job.”
Always begin with attitude, not skills. I’ve made the mistake of becoming enamored with skills and abilities.
Bad attitudes ruin teams.
People with bad attitudes:
Additionally, attitude without aptitude results in frustration and failure. If they can’t perform, can they learn?
Second, success requires constant training. “Become a training machine,” Mark Miller.
Training topics include:
Third, successful teams develop and enjoy esprit de corps. Mark says it’s the “secret sauce” of high performance teams; the essential ingredient. “This is the heart stuff.”
“Your team will never perform at the highest possible level if the members of the team don’t exhibit genuine care and concern for one another.” Mark Miller
Surprising benefit:
Great teams mean you’re not alone.
***
What are the essential ingredients for high performance teams?
What prevents teams from performing?
***
***
*Bruce Tuckman is the originator of forming, storming, norming, and performing.
Tidbits and notes posted on FB and Twitter. Part 221
Note: I take notes of books I read and comment on events and edit sentences that fit my style. I pa attention to researched documentaries and serious links I receive. The page is long and growing like crazy, and the sections I post contains a month-old events that are worth refreshing your memory
The basic concept of wealth at all times was: The privileges of buying services and Not just goods. Like having better opportunities to meet with powerful decision makers, buying better equipped prison cells and services, buying better education systems and health systems….
A secular, progressive region in Afrin has been conquered. A Canton with different religions and ethnic groups, with an egalitarian and parity constitution, and living peacefully side by side, is now at the mercy of barbaric, fanatic Islamists hired by this fascist and Moslem Brotherhood Erdogan of Turkey. All with the support of colonial powers wanting to exploit the vast hydrocarbon wealth in North Eat Syria.
Le grand absent du tutoiement etait le Tu: Olivia ne s’adressait meme plus a quelqu’un “Bon, c’est fini, ces corrections?”
Une personne meprisante cherche partout des gens naifs, des malades… et en trouve facilement.
“Soyez econome de votre mepris: il y a beaucoup de necessiteux”
La haine est proche de l’amour, quand le mepris lui est etranger
L’ imbecile se decouvre a son obsssession d’avoir le mot de la fin: “La betise, c’est de conclure”
I watched Bunuel’s film “The obscure object of Desire”. When a woman is seriously scared of having intercourse, she can drive a one-directional male to craziness by her imaginative tricks. He can have everything but the forbidden target, but the animal has to satisfy his reproductive instinct, any which way.
La gourmandise sacree’: La pamoison eprouvee’ par certaines saintes du 13eme siecle au moment d’avaler l’hostie?
Limaza al kol mousser yaakhod ezen min Allah ta yi2oulou 7ayala shi? Fakkro martayn 2abel ma tarsh2o
Mouwatinaat wa mouwatineen tofraneen: 7atta saalat saghirat ma t3abet. Drouri kel tonzimaat madaniyyat tetbana sakef Nahass al 3ali 7atta yetla3ha tartousheh?
Posted on: July 17, 2018
Part 12. How Israel in 1948 committed Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians, about 400,000 within days in first stage
Israeli historian Benny Morris might deny the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, but Jeremy R. Hammond own research shows that this was indeed how Israel came into being.
The Israeli historian Benny Morris has been very vocal of late in denying that Palestine was ethnically cleansed of Arabs in order for the “Jewish state” of Israel to be established.
In a series of articles in the Israeli daily Haaretz, Morris has debated the question with several of his critics who contend that ethnic cleansing is precisely what occurred.
Not so, argues Morris. So who’s right?
It’s worth noting at the outset that, while such a debate exists in the Israeli media, the US media remains, as ever, absolutely silent on the matter.
Now that the proper historical context has been established, let’s return to Morris’s arguments and address each in turn.
Morris denies that the Jewish leadership “carried out a policy of expelling the local Arabs”. This denial is untenable. Logically, the goal of establishing a demographically “Jewish state” would require the “compulsory transfer”—to borrow Ben-Gurion’s phrase for it, in turn borrowed from the Peel Commission—of a large number of Palestinians.
Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders had explicitly stated their desire to effect this “transfer”, and once war broke out there was a clear tacit understanding between the political leadership and the military commanders toward that end.
As Morris himself has pointed out, there was an “atmosphere of transfer”, and commanders who carried out such expulsions were not punished.
Moreover, from mid-March onward, commanders were given explicit instructions for how this “compulsory transfer” was to be carried out.
If the expulsion of Arab villagers prior to Plan D had received the tacit approval of the leadership, the expulsions thereafter received their explicit approval.
Commanders like Yigal Allon understood their orders very well: it was “imperative” to “cleanse” their areas of operation of their Palestinian inhabitants.
After Blatman cited Morris to support his assertion that Palestine was ethnically cleansed in 1948, Morris accused Blatman of attributing things to him that he had never claimed. Yet Morris himself had previously described what happened during the war as “ethnic cleansing”—and expressed his view that Ben-Gurion’s error was not doing a thorough enough job of it.
Morris argues that Blatman’s assertion “ignores the basic fact that the Palestinians were the ones who started the war”. Even if we accept his assumptions (and totally wrong) that the Arabs’ rejection of the UN partition plan was unreasonable and that they were responsible for starting the war, it does not follow that no ethnic cleansing occurred.
In keeping with his comments to Ari Shavit, what Morris really seems to be arguing here is not that it didn’t happen, but that it was justified;
It’s not that Palestine wasn’t actually ethnically cleansed—clearly, by his own account, it was—just that, in his view, this wasn’t a crime.
And while legal scholars may debate whether such actions were prohibited under the laws of war at the time, there isn’t any ambiguity about the fact that they are recognized today as war crimes—and, regardless of what any international treaties had to say about it, just as immoral then as they would be today.
Moreover, Morris’s assumptions that the UN partition plan was an equitable solution and that Resolution 181 lent legitimacy to the Zionists’ unilateral declaration of the existence of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, are both categorically false.
He bases his arguments that the Jews were acting defensively on the grounds that the Arab states had threatened “to attack the Jewish state” and then carried out that threat by “invading” Israel.
But given the illegitimacy of the May 14 declaration and the inherent prejudice of the Zionist project toward the majority Arab population, this narrative crumbles. To characterize the Arabs as the “invaders” while Palestine’s Arab inhabitants were being systematically expelled or driven into flight and its Arab villages literally wiped off the map is simply to flip reality on its head.
Morris denies that there was ever a decision by the Jewish leadership “to ‘expel the Arabs’”. He repeats that Ben-Gurion “never gave [his officers] an order ‘to expel the Arabs.’”
It might be true that No known documents (so far), including Plan D, contained those exact words, but the leadership’s intent was clear. Indeed, in the very same sentence he says Ben-Gurion gave no such order, Morris notes that Ben-Gurion “let his officers understand that it was preferable for as few Arabs as possible to remain in the new country”.
His implied logic is that without such an explicit order, it wasn’t ethnic cleansing. This is a non sequitur. No explicit order need have been given; it was enough that Haganah commanders understood the leaderships’ intention to have “as few Arabs as possible”, to quote Morris’s own words, in the “Jewish state” they were seeking to establish.
Palestinian refugees fleeing their homes, October 30, 1948 (Source: PalestineRemembered.com)
Moreover, Plan D did make explicit the operational orders to expel Arabs from their villages.
Morris also suggests that since not all Arabs were expelled, therefore it wasn’t ethnic cleansing. But once again his logic is a non sequitur. It doesn’t follow that since there were Arabs who were allowed to remain in the territory that became Israel that therefore the expulsion of the majority of that territory’s Arab inhabitants didn’t constitute ethnic cleansing. Morris can opine that Ben-Gurion didn’t do a thorough enough job of it; but he can’t sustain the suggestion that the lack of thoroughness means it wasn’t ethnic cleansing.
The “atmosphere of transfer” is acknowledged by Morris; yet he asserts that Zionist leaders like Ben-Gurion and Weizmann, who “supported the transfer of Arabs” in the 1930s and early ‘40s, later “supported the UN decision, whose plan left more than 400,000 Arabs in place.” With this comment, he implies that Ben-Gurion and other leaders changed their minds and decided that a population of 400,000 Arabs within the area they desired for their “Jewish state” would be just fine.
Once again, his argument is a non sequitur; their acceptance of the partition plan did not constitute a repudiation of their desire to rid the land of Arabs. On the contrary, it was seen as a pragmatic step toward achieving the ultimate goal of establishing a Jewish state with “less Arabs” (Golda Meir).
Indeed, he further acknowledges that the “atmosphere of transfer” still prevailed in April 1948, but, he argues, this “was never translated into official policy—which is why there were officers who expelled Arabs and others who didn’t.” But, once again, the fact that some Arabs—about 160,000, according to Morris—were permitted to remain does not mean that the rest weren’t victims of ethnic cleansing.
Once again, explicit orders to expel Arabs needn’t have existed for us to recognize what occurred as ethnic cleansing; it was enough that a tacit understanding existed between the political leadership and the military commanders, which Morris acknowledges was in fact the case—including by pointing out that those commanders who expelled Arabs from their villages weren’t punished.
Again, the “atmosphere of transfer” was translated into official policy with Plan D.
On March 24, 1948, Morris argues in Haaretz, Israel Galili “ordered all the Haganah brigades not to uproot Arabs from the territory of the designated Jewish state.” In 1948, he specifies that “Galili instructed all Haganah units to abide by standing Zionist policy, which was to respect the ‘rights, needs and freedom,’ ‘without discrimination,’ of the Arabs living in the Jewish State areas.”[97]
How does Morris reconcile this with the explicit orders under Plan D to collectively punish the civilian population by expelling them from their homes and destroying their villages? How does he reconcile it with the fact that, by his own account, commanders who expelled Arabs and destroyed villages weren’t punished for defying what Morris characterizes as a direct order? Instructively, he makes no attempt to.
But he does note that “Things did change in early April”, meaning that this ostensible order to respect the rights of Palestinian civilians was rescinded. As he notes in 1948, the policy outlined in April was “generally, to evict the Arabs living in the brigade’s area.”[98]
So how does Morris, in light of this admission, maintain that “there was no overall expulsion policy”? He notes that “here they expelled people, there they didn’t, and for the most part the Arabs simply fled.” But, again, neither the fact that some Arabs were allowed to remain nor that many fled out of fear is inconsistent with the recognition of what happened as ethnic cleansing.
Finally, Morris acknowledges that the Zionist leadership as a matter of policy prevented the Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes.
Indeed, this was made largely impossible by the complete destruction of their villages. He makes no effort to reconcile this policy with his denial that ethnic cleansing occurred. Instead, he opines that this policy was “logical and just”. We see once again, thus, that Morris isn’t so much arguing that there was no ethnic cleansing as he is that the ethnic cleansing was justified.
He is attempting to argue that the ethnic cleansing that did occur—which he has explicitly acknowledged did occur, and which he documents extensively in his own writings—was not a crime.
Benny Morris is entitled to his opinions. But to deny that the “Jewish state” of Israel was established by ethnically cleansing hundreds of thousands of Arabs from their homes in Palestine is simply a display of the very intellectual dishonesty he accuses his critics of.
The standard he applies is telling: he defends the ethnic cleansing on the grounds that all of the Arabs who were made refugees by the war and whom Israel refused to allow to return “had tried to destroy the state in the making.” Inasmuch as their very inhabitancy in the land the Zionist leadership desired for their “Jewish state” stood in the way of that project, he has a point.
Their very existence in the land constituted a destruction of the Zionists’ ideal. Hence they had to go. In Morris’s own words, “A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them.”
Beyond that, Morris’s hypocrisy is glaring. He knows perfectly well that most of those expelled were civilians who had taken no part in hostilities. Hence what he is really saying here is that it was “logical and just” for the civilian Arab population to have been collectively punished for the crime some among them committed of putting up resistance to the Zionists’ operations to seize control of the territory they wanted for their “Jewish state”—precisely the collective punishment that Haganah commanders were ordered to carry out under Plan D, the blueprint, by Morris’s own account, for the Zionists’ “war of conquest”.
That Benny Morris applies such a hypocritical standard should not be too surprising. He is, after all, himself a Zionist. As a historian, he has contributed greatly to the literature on the subject, and in so doing, has helped move the discussion forward. By helping us to understand the origins of the conflict, he has empowered us with knowledge that brings clarity on how to achieve a peaceful resolution.
It is unfortunate that he’s lately made such a concerted effort to move the discussion backward again. It is in the context of his own deeply held and scarcely concealed prejudice toward the Palestinians that his attempts now to deny the ethnic cleansing of Palestine must be understood.
Haganah men patrolling the streets of Haifa, April 1948 (Life Magazine. Source: PalestineRemembered.com)
Adonis Diaries 