It has to be the American attitude the English most object to, the 'Can Do' thing, that all you need is some gung ho and any and every problem can be solved. This is really rather something of a pity as while we don't express it in quite the same way we do actually share the underlying attitude. We might not leap around shouting 'Yeehah!' but we do share that thought that just about anything can indeed be done.



We also rather shelter that thought both from ourselves and others: ' Oh, something will turn up' is a common phrase to hear but that isn't the fatalism, the reliance upon luck and happenstance that others hear it for. Rather, behind that almost insouicance, all minds are whirling feverishy to make that something turn up.

Think of Dad's Army: we laugh now at their antics, but that is what 1940 in the south of England was very like. The Army was defeated, there was little or no equipment, yet the butcher and the baker, the retired, the lame and the halt, really did don uniforms and drilled, and people with buckets of sand stood by to put out incendiaries. There was no thought of surrender, no thought that the game was up. This is Britain and we shall never be slaves.

When interviewers and recruitment agencis talk about a winning attitude that's what is meant. Not that every trial and tribulation will be met with a smile, rather, that whatever the trials and tribulations, that efforts to win will continue. Why such an attitude works is rather simpler to explain than the above distinctions between the English and the Americans.

There are very few problems in business that are insoluable. No one is about to ask an engineering director or engineering manager to provide an anti-gravity machine next week. Rather, questions are likely to be about whether we can get another 2% efficiency next month, and perhaps 5% by the end of the quarter? A sales director is unlikely to be asked to successfully invade Russia in winter, but she might indeed be asked to push the company's most profitable line.

These are not insoluable tasks and so should not be met with a defeatist attitude. We might indeed mutter about something turning up but that won't stop all involved from pondering, thinking about it and ultimately, working out how to achieve exactly what is desired. A winning attitude works simply because it believes that winning is indeed possible (if not, in the case of Dad's Army, simply the right and natural way of the world) and thus efforts can be directed towards making it happen, rather than handwringing about how impossible it all is.