"People in Russia loved the idea of not having corruption, but at the end of the day, not everyone is in agreement," the person says. "You are never one of them; you are an outsider."
Andersson says during his time in Russia -- and throughout his career -- he had "zero tolerance" for corruption.
Did he discover a lot of it in Russia?
"Yes," Andersson says. "If you have clear ground rules and live within them, I don't see a problem. But there was business we did not take because we could not take it."
The framework for an auto industry in Russia is well-planned and engineered, "but when you get into how things are executed, it is a very different story," he says. "Is it working? Yes and no."
The biggest challenge is for suppliers, he says.
"I understand how suppliers work and have seen many good ones. But you take a market [where] you have 24 plants and total production capacity of less than 1 million units, then I would say it is extremely difficult for a supplier to have scale and to be profitable."
So, for the first time since he worked at Saab in 1993, Andersson moved back to Sweden, heading to his summer house in Falkenberg, a town of 20,000. He planned to take three months off to "do nothing." But "after one week, I had cleaned my house and organized the silverware in the drawers, and I said, 'I don't think this is working,'" he says.
He started to work his Swedish contacts and reunite with military friends. Eventually, he reconnected with an old professor in the engineering and business schools at Linkoeping University.
This week, Andersson will start there teaching an MBA course in purchasing.