Some more in project management

While working at Ericsson Germany, i was talking to some project managers about project management and project performance analysis for my term project report. My idea of writing term project was to evaluate some project in terms of corporate goals and strategies. For example general goal of Ericsson in Germany are profitability, growth and operational excellence. However during talk one senior project manager of Ericsson told me that project managers there have no influence on project profitability and growth. These are strategic part of the company and only key account managers, contract finalizing responsible and customer satisfaction responsible are player in these strategic management game. However i asked them, so why are you here if you can not contribute to the corporate objecti´ves and strategies? Then he replied that we are functiong as operational team ´we have influence in operational excellence and we are doing that.
In their term operational excellence means efficient use of budget, human resources and ofcourse time. Normally there at Ericsson project manager will have hard times if project runs over budget. Key account managers and other executives do not want to approve change request and finally landing up with project failure most of the time. So project managers there are working as operational team who even do not have any influence in sales. They have to do what the key account managers want them to do. For example if key account manager asked them to develop new testing system for Deutsche telekom or Vodafon or other operator then they will have some budget to start the project but they do not care about the revenue from that project.
Finally i thought that project manager should have full authority to operate project and should have influence in overall project not only in operational part.