We are, all of us, good losers. It shouldn't be so in a culture seemingly obsessed with winning and winners. Schools start early, putting class I students through competitive multiple-choice examinations. Parents prematurely celebrate, treating every minor achievement of their children as the run-up to a future Nobel or Olympic medal. Sabeer Bhatia, Sachin Tendulkar, Vishwanathan Anand, Anil and Mukesh Ambani, N.R. Narayanamurthy, Vinod Dham, Muktesh Pant and Amartya Sen are our role models, and they are, all of them, winners. But we still end up losers.

Is it because India didn't have a wild west, a Protestant work ethic or a generation of baby boomers? Is it because the Independence Movement failed to create a surge of long-lasting nationalism the same way Little Boy and Fat Man did for Japan? Is it because the Indian state never veered far enough left off centre to instill in us an obsession for winning?

It could be any of these. Just as it could be the prevalent culture of mediocrity that makes us tolerate imperfection, the emphasis on quantity, not quality, even sheer lethargy. "Compared to the west, we are definitely more tolerant of shoddy work," says Pradeep Gidwani, Managing Director, Foster's India. Adds Alex Kuruvilla, Managing Director, MTV India, "Our pehle aap (after you, please) culture means we end up watching the world race past us."

Then, there's our fabled sense of fatalism. From the classroom to the boardroom there's an almost universal belief in fate; that what will be will be. To most Indians, victory and defeat are not mutually exclusive outcomes in a game of skill but pre-ordained ends that no amount of human endeavour can alter. Expectedly, no one tries hard. Result: emotions, empty rhetoric, and sentimentalism triumph over reason and logic every time. "Managers in the west are mercenary about achieving their goals," says Gidwani. "Emotions do not come into business decisions."

And when we win we hold back. "There is something socially conditioned in us over the years that teaches us to be self-effacing," says Santrupt Mishra, Director, Birla Management Corporation and the head of human resources at the A.V. Birla Group. "Being aggressive and driven is frowned upon; if we try to push ourselves and our achievements we are called power hungry."

If Indian success stories-there are several-aren't inspirational, blame it on this culture of self-effacement. "I do not think Indians know how to celebrate or merchandise their success," says Piyush Pandey, Group President & National Creative Director, Ogilvy & Mather. "There is a need to make a song and dance every time a Vishwanathan Anand wins a chess tournament or an ad agency wins an award at Cannes; the more you celebrate, the more it inspires others to win."

There is, as anyone familiar with India must be aware, no such thing as a singular Indian psyche. There is a multitude, combinations of variables such as religion, region, caste, language, income and education. Still, there are common traits across this multitude of psyches. One such is negativity. The four major religions that have originated in India, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism preach tolerance and spirituality. Religious texts such as The Bhagwad Gita exhort believers to strive on selflessly without any expectation of a payback. And Gandhian thought-still sold, shrinkwrapped and all in schools across the country-espouses a moderate outlook towards life and material success. Gordon Gekko wouldn't have liked it here: greed isn't good. "The 'little is much' concept is ingrained in our psyche," says Sujaya Banerjee, Vice President (hr), Lowe. There's nothing wrong with austerity; only, it gets in the way of single-minded pursuit of success, material or otherwise.

A couple of centuries of colonial rule have also left their mark on the Indian psyche. "Colonialism bred a certain sense of inferiority and some diffidence," says Rahul Bajaj, Chairman, Bajaj Auto, who swears things haven't changed much since independence. "Diffidence makes winning difficult." Worse, it means we'd prefer to wait for the West to acknowledge an Indian achievement before we start taking it seriously.

The Indian psyche also shows a predilection for conventionalism. Individualism is frowned upon in India: as psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakkar writes in a monograph titled Analysing Why Indian and Western Minds Differ, "the yearning for relationships, for the confirming presence of loved ones and the psychological oxygen they provide is the dominant modality of social relations in India, especially within the extended family. Individuality and independence are not values that are cherished." And so we live on, losers still, but normal ones.

None of these constraints matter out of the country. And so, Indians have done very well for themselves out of India-in medicine, nuclear physics, corporate finance, banking, technology, even marketing. "Indians have all that is required to succeed," says Ashok Chhabra, Executive Director, P&G. "If they are provided an environment to succeed, Indians are second to none." Increasingly, though, that environment can be found in India, if only in pockets. Software is everyone's favourite case in point. "This is an industry where the key input, almost the only one, is skilled manpower," says Bajaj. "The infrastructural requirements and government interference is minimal."

It would be easy to dismiss our success in software as just that, a freak occurrence built around our natural fluency in English and the government's chance omission of software when it was looking around for sectors to regulate. But it still took some doing: while most people saw a blinkered education system whose output was as brilliant as it was lacking in communication skills, India's software pioneers saw a reservoir of analytical and technical skills that could be put to work creating code economically.

Other similar opportunities exist but they go abegging. Managament maven Peter Drucker once described an organisation as something that enabled ordinary people do extraordinary things. Creating winners, then, is the responsibility of the system. "You need support systems for ordinary talent to blossom (into extraordinary one)," says K. Ramkumar, the head of human resources at ICICI Bank. Those organisations that manage to create these support systems succeed beyond their wildest imagination. Those that don't have a ready excuse: the Indian pysche.