"He described a six-day week which began each day with a meeting at 07:30 and would usually last until 19:00. He would also be called in on Sundays or holidays if there was a problem at the plant"

The secret sauce is highly skilled people, working incredibly hard, for relatively low wages. The challenge for everyone else is how to persuade engineers to do this work, rather than go to better paid, less demanding, higher status jobs as software engineers