Rules or Results?

Recently there has been a lot of changes at my workplace. Restructuring and a new management has created a kind of chaos that has directly affected the quality of service it has been providing its customers. Besides the negative impact to the external customers there's also a lot of confusion and resistance among the internal staffs. While there are a lot of reasons that led to this situation, one of the key problems is that policies and procedures have become the center of focus more than the end results. Having a system is important in ensuring uniformity and fairness. However, at what cost have you established the system? Is following rules more important than delivering results? I've also noticed that binding employees in a set of rigid rules is a way of taking away the spirit of team work. Making every individual accountable for a specific set of work is a good idea but does it come at the cost of individuals ignoring the bigger picture? While some changes are good, some changes look like simply a way of exercising dominance. If it's an organization that believes in its vision and customer orientation more than anything, then why is it so stuck in paper work and rigid rules rather than the results? And, why are the rules and changes that was supposed to bring security and standardization causing inconvenience to the customers instead? Why is the value of mutuality being lost in the midst of all this change? I guess the ones who've brought by this rule-based need to ask themselves this question once: "What are we training our staffs for - to make them leaders or docile followers? Are we teaching them about rules to oblige by or helping them understand the shared purpose based on an organization wide vision?"