A former business owner told me a story the other day that may strike a familiar chord with those of you who have experienced a change in management and what it can do to an organization.

Having sold his business several years ago, Roy (not his real name) is in the middle of an employment contract. It's straight salary, with no incentives. Since the sale, the acquiring company has not invested in the business. This has led to customer dissatisfaction and an increase in complaints because of a decrease in quality.  Recently, Roy was informed by the new national sales director that henceforth all salespeople were to use a snazzy new software application -- one that manages customer complaints. "You can check off up to 50 complaint categories!" she told him, excitedly. Roy pointed out to the sales director that before the company was sold, there was no need for a system to management complaints, because there were only about five complaints a year out of perhaps 5,000 transactions. Now there are that many in a week. The company seems committed to doing a great job tracking the rise in complaints, but has no plan to address their cause.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Another company, a food franchise, has a large turnover of staff. A franchisee who has been in the system for nearly a decade wanted to purchase letterhead. The last time he needed it, he ordered it from the company's intranet. This letterhead was very high-end and beautifully designed, and even in these days of email communication, the franchisee used the letterhead to great advantage for proposals, thank-you notes to clients and other direct mail needs. Somewhere along the line, the franchisor decided there was no need to have printed letterhead and instead substituted a Word template that franchisees would print from their PCs.  Low-end, cheap, without any image.  When the franchisee inquired why the franchisor had stopped making the beautiful letterhead available, the response from the latest person to occupy the marketing manager chair was, "I didn't know there ever was letterhead."

The common problem in both these companies is the lack of institutional memory. In the first case, people in positions of authority have no clue what customers expect and have grown accustomed to, because new management is so eager to put their own fingerprint on the new operation that they are uninterested in what made the company valuable enough to purchase in the first place. In the second anecdote, the small details that created positive customer experience get lost as new people come on board and top management is so distracted by the usual operational chaos that they forget the details that made the business work so well.