Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Ben-Veniste

Bureaucracies rarely fail because nobody had the data; they fail because nobody had the nerve, incentive, or mechanism to move it. Richard Ben-Veniste, speaking as a lawyer shaped by investigations, lands on the phrase "communicating in a vertical way" with prosecutorial restraint that doubles as indictment. "Vertical" sounds neutral, even technical, but it smuggles in a hierarchy story: people at the bottom knew things, people at the top needed to know them, and the organization made that transfer unnaturally hard.

The wording is careful. He avoids accusing individuals of malice or incompetence; instead he frames a systems failure. "Could get pushed up" is doing a lot of work. It implies gravity runs the wrong direction inside large institutions: information doesn't rise on its own, it has to be shoved through layers that are built to filter, sanitize, and delay. That passive construction also echoes a familiar post-crisis language where accountability diffuses into process.

Context matters because Ben-Veniste is widely associated with the 9/11 Commission era critique of intelligence and law enforcement silos. His point isn't just that the FBI missed a memo; it's that the FBI's internal architecture made it easy for warnings to die in middle management, where ambiguity is safest and escalation is risky. The subtext is cultural as much as procedural: an institution that prizes chain-of-command discipline can inadvertently punish the kind of lateral urgency that prevention requires.

It's a lawyerly way of arguing for reform without naming villains: if the pipeline is broken, you redesign the pipeline. But it also quietly asks the harder question: when "decision-makers" are insulated from bad news, are they really making decisions at all?