COLUMN ONE : How to Deal With Clinton : Want to fit in at the new White House? Be prepared for late-night calls, master the details and don’t back him into a corner. Being a baby boomer helps.

Memo to: The New Cabinet.

Subject: The New Boss.

Congratulations on being selected to join President-elect Bill Clinton’s new Administration. Better take a minute to study the terrain. You are now working for a man who relaxes with 500-page policy tomes (interrupted by occasional detective novels), who thinks nothing of calling advisers at midnight to bat around an idea, who sends back 30-page memos to get the exact source of a statistic on Page 29.

And don’t be fooled by his outward affability. Clinton is a man who has strong likes and dislikes when it comes to those who serve him.

In that spirit, based on the experience of friends, aides in Arkansas and advisers in his presidential campaign, here are one-short-of-a-dozen rules for understanding your new boss. Taken together, they constitute a road map to the mind of the next President--a guide to his style of collecting information, weighing advice and making decisions.

Rule No. 1: An important title doesn’t necessarily guarantee influence with Clinton. Like most politicians, he doesn’t like to fire people. But he’s not averse to shifting work and responsibility away from someone he decides is falling short.

“Clinton is a guy,” says Samuel Popkin, a political scientist at UC San Diego and former campaign adviser, “who makes lots of adjustments to keep real power and energy on top. The real question with Bill is going to be who he gives the work, not who he gives the title.”

In his presidential campaign, for example, he moved authority over fund-raising from Bob Farmer, a big name, to Rahm Emmanuel, an unknown. Likewise, over time, authority for advertising strategy shifted from Frank Greer to Mandy Grundwald, a younger partner in Greer’s firm. And who had heard of George Stephanopoulos, Clinton’s chief spokesman, 12 months ago?

Rule No. 2: Bring lots of information to the Oval Office. The fastest way to fall out of favor with Clinton, says one of his senior campaign advisers, is “not to be prepared. If he called and said we need to do ‘X’ and you say we need to do ‘Y,’ he would never just say OK. He would always ask you for 10 reasons.”

Some politicians like to read memos; some like to hear their aides argue a case like lawyers before a jury. In that sense, Clinton is ambidextrous. He’ll read almost anything people put in front of him (although he’s grateful for brevity) and he likes to gather large groups to hash out contentious issues.

His favorite approach, said one adviser, “is to put people in a room who wouldn’t normally be there together.” For Exhibit A, look at the eclectic assortment of people who were in the hall at an economic conference in Little Rock this week.

Whether on paper or in person, be ready to answer questions--lots of them. Clinton’s style of running meetings often is to steer them by asking questions without tipping his own hand. Few questions are too obscure: While drafting his economic plan last summer, he surprised one of his advisers by asking how many jobs each dollar in new public spending is expected to produce.

Another tip: Always cite specific sources for information. He’s been known to stop meetings to ask people where numbers come from.

Rule No. 3: Don’t back him into a corner. This is tricky: Clinton has a bad habit of delaying decisions. But one sure way to get his back up is to push him into a decision before he feels ready. Many in Clinton’s orbit believe that he denied campaign chairman Mickey Kantor’s bid to head the transition largely because he believed that he was being rushed into the choice right after the exhausting campaign.

An even more certain path to exile is to deny him options. Clinton reacts very badly when advisers tell him that he has no choice but to move in a certain direction. He believes that he should always have choices and he tends to tune out subordinates who insist that their way is the only way.

Rule No. 4: Don’t rely too heavily on precedent to make your case. During the preparation for the presidential debates, Clinton and his aides discussed at length whether to address President Bush as “Mr. President” or “Mr. Bush.”

At one session, one of his advisers told Clinton that Democratic challengers had always called the incumbent Mr. President in both of the previous two elections. Another adviser shot back: “That’s right and we always lost.”

In the debates, Clinton addressed the President as Mr. Bush.

Rule No. 5: Don’t try to hide weaknesses in your arguments. Those who have argued with him say that you’re much better off leveling with Clinton about the potential downside in a recommended course of action than denying that risks exist. “If you prepare too tidy a box,” said one of his top campaign strategists, “he will untie it.”

Rule No. 6: Always remember that with Clinton, no idea exists in isolation from its political consequences. In this, Clinton could not be more different from the last Democratic President, Jimmy Carter, a trained engineer who tried to solve social problems as though they were mathematical equations.

“Carter wanted everything very engineer-like; he believed there was a ‘right’ answer,” says Popkin. “Clinton is not like that; he understands the difference between a technical problem and a political problem very well.”

The danger in this attitude is that it can produce excessive caution--and oversensitivity to the demands of loud interest groups. Even some advisers worry that in the appointment process, he has appeared to give interest groups too big a voice in deciding the fate of some candidates--such as economist Larry Summers, who sank as a potential chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers after he ran afoul of environmentalists.

Clinton displayed a similar malleability on some difficult issues during the campaign, among them raising fuel efficiency standards for the auto industry. He stood four-square behind them--until the unions and Democratic politicians in Michigan objected that higher standards could cost jobs. Then Clinton hedged.

One route around this instinctive caution may be to appeal to his sense of history: He has read widely about previous presidents and he’s conscious of how his decisions “will look not only in 1996 but beyond,” says one close adviser.

Rule No. 7: Embrace chaos. People who revere tidy organizational flow charts and ferociously defend fiefdoms generally do not do well around Clinton. One buzzword circulating in Clinton circles is that his approach in the White House will look like business guru Tom Peters’ vision of “liberation management”--a loose, decentralized manner of operation that one Clinton intimate described as “management by walking around.”

Cabinet officers or White House staffers who try to control the flow of information to the President are in for frustration; he’s renowned in Arkansas for placing direct calls to legislators, department staff members, anyone he thinks has a fact he needs. “If you are uptight about your box, you are going to be in trouble, because this guy doesn’t stay in the boxes,” says Derek Shearer, an old friend and adviser on economic policy.

The same thing, by the way, is true in meetings. Clinton is trained as a lawyer, but he doesn’t have the classically meticulous lawyer’s mind, the way his wife, Hillary, does. His style is more discursive. “He rambles a little and he will take you on tangents,” says one top campaign adviser. “But they are never boring tangents.”

Rule No. 8: Stay at your desk, or at least by the phone. Clinton has a boundless capacity for work and he expects those around him to share his enthusiasm. “It was not unusual . . . for my phone to ring at 12 midnight or 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. and to go from there,” says Henry Oliver, his gubernatorial chief of staff in Arkansas from 1990 through 1991.

Rule No. 9: Wait until dark. This is the upside of Rule No. 7. Clinton isn’t much for mornings. On the other hand, he often convenes meetings that run late, frequently over dinner. He’s at his most receptive then.

“If I was going to make a pitch at him,” says Skip Rutherford, an old Arkansas friend, “I think noon at least is your best time.”

Rule No. 10: Pay attention to the grass roots. While hurtling around the country last year, Clinton gave his private fax number at the gubernatorial mansion to strangers he met at campaign events so that they could send him memos on ideas they shouted into his ear. Then he would read the memos, and ask staff members to read them. Or, in staff meetings on policy issues, he would sometimes raise objections based on something a businessman told him on a factory tour. (After hearing several entrepreneurs complain about workers’ compensation costs, he briefly asked his economic advisers if, in their spare time, they could work up a new federal policy on it.)

Staffers who have not done so in the past now uniformly agree that it is wise to look into the ideas Clinton receives this way.

Rule No. 11: Chemistry counts.

Sorry, there’s not much you can do to study up for this one. In choosing subordinates, Clinton looks not only for skills but an emotional connection. He shares the sentiment of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who once said: “The members of my Cabinet will be members of my family--my official family.”

Vice President-elect Al Gore rose dramatically in Clinton’s estimation after the two men sat down for a (late-night) interview last summer. An aide to one Democrat recently summoned to Little Rock for an interview with Clinton about a potential Cabinet appointment said that, while the meeting did explore certain issues, “it was more of a sense of trying to figure out if the chemistry worked.”

There’s no sure-fire shortcut to a rapport with Clinton--the way, say, a fondness for touch football served with John F. Kennedy. But familiarity with baby boomer culture doesn’t hurt. Study the difference in Clinton’s body language between last Friday, when three of the four appointees he announced were under 50, and last Thursday, when he was naming a predominantly gray-suited economic team headed by 71-year-old Sen. Lloyd Bentsen as Treasury secretary.

“People from his own generation have a leg up,” says one baby boom-era adviser. “We can talk about Jefferson Airplane and I don’t think Lloyd Bentsen can.”

And speaking of chemistry, it’s a good idea to remember Clinton’s answer last week when he was asked about Hillary’s influence on the selection of his economic team.

“She advised me on these decisions,” he said, “as she has on every other decision I’ve made in the last 20 years.”