We used to think a four minute mile was impossible, until Roger Bannister in 1954. Think how all the other runners felt after that run: they had to catch up. Now it's done all the time and is the standard.
Efficiency means not doing unnecessary things, not employing unnecessary people. They may have been doing something useful, or just something that someone thought was important.
The important point is the question of what exactly you are being efficient at doing. As you drive towards a particular Pareto optimization, economic forces have changed what you need to optimize for, perhaps driven by your own optimization. The limiting factors have changed.
If the moat of required competencies and capital allocation is large enough, you can hide a lot of inefficiencies (aka your boss's friends) for quite a long time.
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Edit: people can comment about crony capitalism etc if they like, my comment is not meant to be comprehensive, merely observational.
I'd also add that government tends to magnify these distortions since it gates access to a lot of demand behind a bidding process that's heavily politicized and reliant on lobbying. So the market as thought of in economics doesn't really exist anymore.
The market can impose some discipline, but it's up to the humans in the driver seat.
But different; the US is the best funded / most expensive military in the world by a big margin, and the defense contractors know it and develop weapons and price them accordingly. It's why they use fancy weapon systems instead of tried, tested and cheap Kalashnikovs.
SpaceX is the Kalashnikov of rockets, if you think about it.
Another context for SpaceX is the Moonshot - the big transformational project. In a Moonshot, everyone has to do more work than their job requires. This is called glue work and normally you should limit what glue work you do because you may not be rewarded for it. People working at SpaceX seem to believe in the mission and that is a reward in itself, which leads people to be motivated to bridge all those little gaps that form between job roles.
I'd love to hear what other contexts people use to think about this.
If the CEO is patting the head of development on the back for results he got by stonewalling sales, and the head of sales for stonewalling development, that's the source of the problem even if the company sells used carpets.