COMPLEX PROCESS.(The Talk of the Town)(discourse analysis and leadership potential)

Kathryn Cason likes watching Tim Russert grill political candidates on "Meet the Press." She likes to see them stammer and squirm when they are forced to answer questions for which they are not prepared, and she likes to comb through the transcripts afterward. The kinds of words she's most interested in are the really simple ones ("if," "and," "or"). Specific nouns are of scant relevance in trying to evaluate leadership potential, which is what Cason, the widow of Elliott Jaques, the management theorist and the coiner of the phrase "mid-life crisis," has been trying to do for decades. Five years ago, she and Jaques, whose consulting clients included the United States Army and the Church of England, established a research group in Massachusetts called the Requisite Organization International Institute, which, among other things, seeks to find ways of identifying future leaders in business and world affairs. Under this banner, she carries on her late husband's work.

Cason particularly enjoyed President Bush's appearance with Russert in February. "There was a period there where he was pressed against the wall," she said the other day, referring to Russert's challenge of the President's war rationale. "Bush really was struggling and working hard. He was not making declarative statements that he had learned to say, and so I was delighted."

Bush's answers impressed her. Not because he convinced her that Iraq had posed an imminent threat--she didn't say whether she thinks this or not--but because, under pressure, he demonstrated a cumulative, as opposed to a merely declarative, thought process. He said the word "and" a lot. (Cason circled thirteen "and"s in the transcript from just one of his responses.) Many of Cason's colleagues in the field of Requisite Organization Theory had believed that Bush was strictly a declarative kind of guy, but she had always suspected otherwise, and she felt vindicated. "Bush is not stupid," she said.

In the recent history of Presidential politics, the list of declarative thinkers includes, frankly, a lot of losers: Bob Dole, Michael Dukakis, Gerald Ford. Cumulative types (Bill Clinton, Walter Mondale, Richard Nixon) are more of a mixed bag. There are two more categories on Cason's complexity ladder. Moving up, we get serial, or conditional, processing (lots of "if"s, "or"s, and "because"s), and, finally, parallel processing (employing multiple serial constructions simultaneously). Serial minds, wouldn't you know it, belong to natural-born winners like Reagan and J.F.K.

Cason has discovered that in the Presidential elections for which adequate transcripts are available--the previous seven, plus Kennedy-Nixon, and Lincoln-Douglas--the winning candidate has almost always ...