ne typically assumes that the business activities of large multinationals are rather boring, carried out by seasoned, suited executives with years of experience in their industry, if not the same company. These are the gray men you see in business class lounges, reading the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal. They breathe a rarified air of power and prestige, and they make a lot of money.

Dr. George Logush does not fit this mold. He is the vice-president of Kraft Foods responsible for Ukraine and some 11 other countries in the former Soviet area. He did not arrive at that place in Kraft, which is ranked 179 on the 2010 Forbes Global 500, by climbing a steep corporate ladder. He arrived by a very different route.

Always looking for a challenge in life, in the early 90s Logush left a tenured position as professor and associate dean at Fordham University’s Graduate School of Business, against the advice of friends and faculty, to strike out into the uncertain world of building a market-driven company in a former Soviet state, Ukraine, where all business decisions had been dictated by government economic policies and central planning.

“I was bored” with teaching macroeconomics and econometrics at Fordham, he tells us in a recent interview at his office in Kyiv. “For the students (the course work) is tough, but it’s not for the professors.” After a while, instructors are simply explaining again what they have explained to other students before.

Logush had helped establish Fordham’s Graduate School of Business in 1975 and thus had more of an attachment to it than most of the teaching staff. While there, he had separately set up and run a successful HMO in the 80s, but that too, he says, “was getting boring.”

“I just chucked it all,” he said with a smile, when in 1992 he gave up his teaching post and took up an offer from R.J. Reynolds to launch their operations in Ukraine.

At the time, he had already begun testing the business waters in Ukraine, and in 1989 had helped found and run the International Management Institute (IMI) in Kyiv, which quickly had established itself as the premium business school in the region.

In 1992 Ukraine was like a wobbly-kneed, new-born calf just out of the womb of the collapsed Soviet Union. It had no government of its own and had to start building real institutions of power from scratch. The economy was in freefall as activities once productive within the Soviet economy were suddenly obsolete or irrelevant in a newly independent state trying to become a market economy.

For R.J. Reynolds he oversaw the purchase of two factories and the establishment of a successful enterprise in Ukraine. He notes that in the early 90s, inflation was rampant as the economy crumbled under the stress of transition. By 1996 GDP plunged 70 percent in the midst of severe devaluation and super hyperinflation.

With inflation as high as 100 percent a week, “I had to change prices as often as twice a week” to keep the company profitable. In 1992 one dollar purchased two karbovanets (or 500 rubles). After inflation had done its work, one dollar purchased 250,000 rubles.

But even in these chaotic circumstances, “you can still make profits,” he avers, with a knowing smile. Under his management, R.J. Reynolds achieved 60 percent market share in tobacco products. And Logush was once more getting bored.

The accounting and consultancy giant KPMG asked him to set up its KPMG-Barents Group operations in Ukraine, and he took that on, focusing much of his efforts on attracting investors to Ukraine, such as Interbrew, and setting up the Banking Academy. At that time, though, this was not easy. Ukraine simply looked too daunting to most potential investors, as it lacked much of the infrastructure needed to run a modern company, not to mention the legal framework and judicial system to provide security and stability to investors.

Once more feeling the call of a challenge he could get his teeth into, Logush jumped when in 1995 he was offered the job of establishing Kraft Foods in Ukraine. Ever since, he has been engaged in a relentless drive to develop the company and its brands in the countries of the former Soviet Union (with the exception of Russia, which is run separately by Kraft).

“I am not bored yet,” he says, and he certainly doesn’t seem so.

In 1995 Kraft purchased a factory that made only chocolate products. In its first year of business, turnover was some $4 million. Today, Kraft runs three large factories in Ukraine (and is building a fourth), and distributes its products in 11 other countries, 10 of those in the CIS, and Mongolia. Its annual turnover in the region is “around half a billion dollars.” Kraft is #1 in market share in this region in chocolate, coffee, salted snacks and cookies.

When he started Kraft in Ukraine there was only a tiny pool of capable people who were trained in the ways of multinationals, some of whom he had taught at IMI. Instead of reaching back to the mother corporation for help, Logush set about training his own cadre of talented people. He went to the best university in town and selected 12 of the brightest students who had completed two years.

He treated these as his own private class, raising them as young Kraft managers while they completed their degrees. As they moved along and rose in responsibility, he brought in new blood, all the time training up his own people.

He says of these veterans of his training that “they are all over the Kraft world today.” Two are VPs at the office in Vienna that handles all of Central and East Europe, the CIS and the Middle East.

Today, with some 250 employees at the head office in Kyiv, another 2,500 across Ukraine, and some 2,000 more in the rest of his region, Logush remains the single expat in the operation.

He points out that a more typical model for a multinational setting up in a new market is to staff the top half-dozen executive slots with expats. He identifies four key problems with this approach: 1. There is no path for local managers to succeed the top brass; 2. This structure tends to create an “us versus them” mentality and culture; 3. It cripples the nurturing of company spirit; and 4. It produces mediocre results.

As we leave the conference room where we have been meeting, we come across a dozen young Ukrainians who look for all the world like a bunch of university students. Logush addresses them in fluent Ukrainian and then introduces them to me as the people who built Kraft’s success in Ukraine.

He says the Ukrainians he has recruited are extremely hard working, inventive and resourceful. “They are bright young people, open to learning and to the rest of the world.” What’s more they are survivors of a worse era and optimistic about their future and the future of their country. They are the key to Kraft’s success in Ukraine, he stresses.

Logush is no slouch at languages, as you might have guessed. He is fluent in Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, German and Spanish, and he acknowledges that this ability is a big part of his own success. He enjoys literature and the theater in all those languages, and considers philology a hobby.

Logush is a Hungarian name, but his parents were immigrants from Ukraine when he was just a young boy. Ironically, he met his Ukrainian wife at a medical exhibition in Vienna; she is a health care administrator. He says having a family to go home to at night is hugely important as a balance to his hectic business career. He notes there is good theatre and music in Kyiv, including opera and ensembles. His own favorite composers are Dvořák and Lyatoshynsky.

He points out that one of the main reasons that many major companies hesitate to enter the Ukrainian market is fear of the unknown, and the different. European managers who visit Ukraine to assess its potential often are put off by the evident limitations and difficulties of doing business there.

This, combined with the regular drumbeat of negative coverage of Ukraine in the media, has resulted in limited foreign investment. This keeps our competitors out, he says smiling. “Ukraine is one of the best kept secrets.”

This is something increasingly recognized by business people from non-Western countries. To them, Ukraine looks promising. Companies from India, Egypt, China and Malaysia are now investing. Successful investors “have a hell of a lot of talent and not many hang-ups,” he says to sum up his views on the subject.

Kraft used to import palm oil it needed for some products. Now a Malaysian company has set up a plant in Ukraine to produce it, and Kraft buys locally.

Kraft is “by far” the leader in potato chips, selling three times its nearest competitor. To supply its chip-making plants, Kraft now grows 70,000 tons of potatoes a year in Ukraine.

Logush is an academic who practices what he preaches, to great success. He says the investors who are succeeding in Ukraine today all are highly flexible and entrepreneurial managers who have learned to adapt to the local situation, whether in the products they offer or in how they produce them and get them to market.

With no highway system connecting cities in this large country of 47 million (the only bit of highway is from the airport to the city in Kyiv; other roads are mostly two lanes), a company like Kraft has at times major headaches getting its products to market in a timely fashion. But this is just another problem to solve, to Logush. “You get a surprise every day,” he says without emotion.

Logush has always seen the potential in Ukraine. After watching Poland’s transformation after its liberation in 1989, he has been able to see where Ukraine could go. “I saw the roadmap,” he says.

Since setting up shop for Kraft in 1995, Logush’s Ukraine operation has been the fastest growing business unit in all of Kraft for four of those 15 years. In 1997 the business expanded 70 percent, and in 2008 it grew 43 percent.

“Like a surfer, you have to catch the wave when you see it coming,” he says of business timing. “I saw the future: Ukraine going in the direction of a market economy.” Being the first through Ukraine’s post-Soviet door has been a huge benefit for Kraft. “Everything in life is a matter of timing.”