Stephen Barr (“Federal Diary,” Washington Post) reported that Max Stier (Partnership for Public Service) and others are endeavoring to lure alluring talent to government ranks.OPM and Stier’s organization are working with hundreds of colleges and dozens of federal agencies to achieve a laudable goal.  There’s only one problem.  It won’t work.Too much of today’s dialogue about not being able to attract the best and brightest, motivated and energetic, misses the point.  It’s not because high performers aren’t adequately compensated.  It’s not that rewards, pecuniary and otherwise, are insufficient.  It’s because bureaucracies kill.  They squeeze the ever-living daylights out of you.  They inhale oxygen, leaving none for the denizens.When you first hear the words “federal government” what pops into your mind?  I doubt it’s wide-open, proving-ground, technology leader, or creativity hotbed.It’s the bureaucracy, the reams of rules, regs, laws, mandates, procedures, review layers, policies, practices, protocols, traditions, redundancies, correspondence manuals, operating manuals, etc., etc., that prevents the blossoming of society’s flowers.If a sunflower seed is placed in a coffee cup, the stalk won’t grow as large as if it were planted in the middle of a meadow.  Ironically and paradoxically, leviathan organizational structures, larger than many meadows, offer psychological growing fields no bigger than a coffee cup – small, unventilated, and malnourished.Let’s cease worrying for the moment about attracting Young Turks to government service until we transform the current environment, which suffocates everything and everyone it touches.I think I have a handle on the WHAT is the problem, but I have no handle on the HOW to fix.  Do you?

Fred Apelquist, contributing editor