Many years ago, I had the chance to ask a Toyota engine designer how long it took his company to produce a new engine from a clean sheet of paper. The next 2.5 years are spent executing this plan, reviewing both our progress and our assumptions along the way, and putting the engine into production. He assured me the same process was used by the vehicle platform team, though three years were spent developing the plan, and two years executing it. This is just part of the answer. And a very small part at that.
People make the real difference.
Use them properly, and they can create time and money. The effective use of human capital demands an extended enterprise view of the world in which each project is a series of concentric circles. Information flows out from the center, and ripples carry more detailed information back. Transparency lets everyone view all of the relevant information, and the flat structure helps keep politics and recrimination to a minimum. At its core this is a democratic system, messy but effective.