More often, the shuffle creates new fiefdoms, new dotted line bosses, and not one substantive improvement in function. (It's usually too painful to make the necessary horizontal changes to push "peter principle" types into harmless positions. These people are the re-organizers' friends, vassals, or patrons. What inhuman manager could bear to throw his friends under the bus to no immediate advantage for himself?)
For example: when you have turf war between two managers, a re-org creates the opportunity for turf war between three or more: the old empire-builder who was ejected, the new empire-builder brought in, and the manager who was already encroaching on the old fief.
That said, I have not worked at a large company before, so I might think the same way in your shoes.
In my opinion, the biggest reason why those upper management folks in big companies make those mistakes when they reorg is because they don't have a view of what happens in the trenches. The details are critical when determining whether a specific service can be provided by a specific group and be tracked by a specific system.
They don't get that a system's order database has a data structure that can't accommodate a new category of product types and a new way of doing work. They crunch the numbers, but the inefficiency lost from poor processes due to lack of understanding at the ground level makes those numbers meaningless in the end.
At my present employer, I have been very explicit: I do not want promotion, I do not want to be management (there is no tech career track). Which has the interesting side-effect of making me basically unmanageable by their rules; there's neither carrot nor stick that can be used on me. So I get left alone to get on with real work. I've never been more productive!
You can't really prevent politics from rearing its ugly head in a large organization, but the best you can do is make sure that you hire extremely competent, honest and straightforward employees and treat them absolutely fairly. One of my bosses had a really great rule for making decisions on new hires. Besides being technically competent, committed and stuff like that, you need to ask yourself whether you'd like to have dinner with this person every single week. If the answer is no, you probably shouldn't be hiring that person.
It was very successful on all 3.
I can see how a huge organization will turn this into a committee that will end in disaster.
Once in a while, parts of the org chart, get re-organized. People moved vertically and horizontally. Carefully moving the "newly incompetent" to a horizontal position that suits their competence level (ie remove the responsibilities that they handle badly and increase those they handle well).