Lileks has a fun bleat up today - the part that really struck me was his experiences with a couple of vendors (Best Buy and Marshall Fields, but it could be any large corp.). The trouble he ran into is common to companies where individual employees have no stake in the results - the Dilbert problem of "the pay's the same no matter what I do". Here's the punchline:

Lesson: from Best Buy to Marshall Field’s, it’s the same problem. One day a company is responsive, quick, savvy. Then one day it’s one percent bigger than it was before, and something happens. They’re the IRS. They’re the Pentagon. They’re an organization slowly ground into ruin by a thick busy level of managers, some of whom are in charge of extracting point-of-sale contact info, others who are going to make their bones on a store-wide phone-system overall. Elephants playing patty-cake.

When the people you deal with have no idea why they are asking the questions they ask, it ends up being a problem. Something to consider at acquisition time, I think.