Can run generic mcdonald’s art that ran in 9/27 LA

Alf Nucifora

It’s an old saw that you can’t change the way some people perceive the personality traits of certain nationalities.

For those folks, the French will always be arrogant and condescending; the Swiss aloof and detached; and the Russians rude and surly.

Now, McDonald’s knows otherwise.

The giant corporation made the decision to take on Russia in the mid-’70s. Well, at least one man did against the initial advice of then-Chairman Ray Kroc and his board.

After 14 years of protracted negotiations, innumerable delays and setbacks, and a welter of naysayer admonitions, George Cohon experienced the satisfaction of opening McDonald’s first Russian store in Moscow’s famous Pushkin Square in 1990.

On its grand opening day, the restaurant served 30,567 customers, most of whom waited for hours in long serpentine lines that circled the store. Today, that same store has the highest average daily transaction count of any of the 21,000 McDonald’s stores worldwide.

The fast-food chain has expanded to five Russian cities and 28 towns. It has served 255 million customers to date and currently employs 6,500 Russians working out of a central processing and distribution center and 49 stores, with more on the way.

In his recently published book, “To Russia with Fries,” Cohon details the trials and tribulations of staffing an organization from scratch in a country where “service with a smile” and “the customer is always right” were subversive concepts.

Cohon’s challenges began with the need to develop his own 100,000-square-foot, McComplex processing center to handle 57 tons of food and supplies each day. It currently employs 400 people, all of whom had to be trained from scratch.

Then there was the problem of filling hundreds of positions for the Moscow store from a labor pool that didn’t know a Big Mac from a bowl of borscht.

All of that had to be done amid the constant refrain from home-side experts who Cohon said were quick to point out repeatedly that “you will never get Soviet citizens to work the way you want McDonald’s employees to work.”

The reality of the experience defied everybody’s worst fears. When the 630 positions were advertised, Cohon received 27,000 written applications, a testament to the power of American branding. At the commencement of training, most of the new crew, including managers, had never tasted a hamburger, let alone made one.

That didn’t stop them from performing their duties with an enthusiasm and sense of professionalism that matched and even outperformed their U.S. peers.

Wrote Cohon, “When our first customers entered the restaurant on Pushkin Square, they were greeted by crew members waving them over to the counter. Since then, every Russian crew has done the same. For someone at a counter to wave and smile and call over a customer is precisely, dramatically the opposite of the way customers used to be treated in restaurants and stores throughout the Soviet Union.”

Not only does McDonald’s fill the 700-seat Pushkin Square store every day, it’s also doing its best to burrow into the Russian undergrowth. Eighty percent of the supply chain is now local, and Cohon hopes to see that grow even more.

Eventually, he sees a time when Russian franchisees will become a fundamental element of the company’s expansion plans within Russia and surrounding nations.

What lessons has Cohon learned?

Perseverance is at the top of the list. With that goes the need to ignore the naysayers, even if they include the revered and experienced senior manager types.

The most important lesson, however, relates, as it always does, to people. Select your workers carefully; train them obsessively; once they’ve earned it, trust them explicitly; and never fail to acknowledge and reward.

To that end, remember it’s not always a matter of dollars and cents. While the conversation may commence with the need for more money, most times it’s really a demand for more psychic recognition and reward.

For McDonald’s in Russia, attention to the employee has paid off handsomely.

Cohon sums it up best: “One of the great pleasures of our Moscow opening was watching the grim, stony faces of some of our older customers people who had been scowled at by officials and shopkeepers all their lives slowly break into a smile simply because one of our crew members was smiling at them.”

Alf Nucifora is an Atlanta-based marketing consultant. He can be contacted via e-mail at [email protected], his Web site www.nucifora.com, or by fax at (770) 952-7834.