(FORTUNE Magazine) – Dear Quantperson: I noticed in the February 7 issue of the magazine inexplicably running your stuff that when American corporations were rated on their reputations, the ten with the highest rankings turned out to include four run by managers who came to our country from other lands. (See box, America's Best?) Like your editors' preferences, that proportion seems hard to explain, the more so as there is no discernible national or ethnic pattern behind this result. The four ex-foreigners include one Brit (Dennis Weatherstone of J.P. Morgan), one Cuban (Roberto Goizueta of Coca-Cola), one Canadian (Livio DeSimone of 3M), and one German (Wolfgang Schmitt of Rubbermaid). My question is whether that .400 batting average for the non-native managers should be viewed as just a coincidence, or does it more plausibly signify that they make better bosses than their homegrown counterparts? Or are the data perchance more consistent with a plot by the International Chamber of Commerce? By the way, I am not a conspiracy theorist, at least not yet. GETTING SUSPICIOUS

Dear Suspect: One senses that the ways of the world are more explicable than you realize; in any event, the case you present is easy enough to analyze. As noted, four of the ten most highly regarded companies in the FORTUNE survey were run by individuals born abroad. You do not indicate the extent to which large U.S.-based corporations generally are run by such auslanders, but there are reasons to believe the proportion is 10% or less. For example, in a 1993 Business Week list of CEOs, only 68 out of 1,000 proved to have been born outside the U.S. Mr. Statistics shall be conservative and say the best estimate is 10%. So the question is: If non-natives constitute only 10% of our universe, and if we randomly select ten CEOs from this universe, what is the probability that the ten will include at least four from abroad? The answer is that it is extremely improbable. There is only one chance in 78 of the exercise's producing more than three via chance alone. It is therefore highly likely that something else was involved in this particular group of ten. What might it be -- and how might it relate to the superior reputations of the companies headed by the group? The original FORTUNE commentary on the four CEOs suggested that ''as companies increasingly cross borders, they're apparently better off run by executives who have done the same.'' A related | possibility is that the best American corporations may be the most relentlessly ''meritocratic,'' i.e., most willing to turn to superior people even when they are not Yankees. Your conjecture about the International Chamber has definite cinematic potential and will be forwarded to Oliver Stone.