Organisational change - what does this mean?

I had a conversation with a chap a few days ago about organisational change - what he actually wanted was a change to the organisational design of his organisation (same people, different labels and responsibilities) along with a few remuneration and job role changes.

What he didn't want was organisational change, where there is a rethink of the way people work, inprovements to processes and systems, team and organisational culture and suchlike. This type of activity will drive out real financial value, whereas simply changing the organisational design is likely to incur costs, cause unnecessary turmoil and focus away from getting the job done.

Businesses are adept at changing the organisational design of their operations - how many places have we all worked where we see things changing every week, month, quarter in this respect - but these tweaks are rarely (never?) assessed in terms of the impacts that they will have, operationally and financially. If we accept that people don't like change, and they come to work to do a good job, we need managers to think about the impacts of their actions and not have a casual attitude to things that they can do with a swift memo. What organisations really need is strategic thinking- for instance, will this change actually deliver real financial value, what needs to happen to make the change accepted and effective, and are there other things that need to be done to ensure continued high-quality customer service etc.