It appears I have been very lucky with my immediate superiors.
My direct bosses have always been good enough to not get into the way, and generally handled their jobs so that those things did not drop to me. However, our upper management echelon seems way too large and utterly incompetent in its job, but that seems to be the way it nowadays works in this country. There's always sort of fear when our CEO is included in the talks with another international company that he will single-handedly destroy any and all hopes for any sort of cooperation. I do suspect that we are not the only one having this plight, though.