I actually think both are important and pretty much define what real productivity is. Since the company pays me dough surely it has a say in what I should work on.

And a bonus if manager can pull his weight to make things happen, i.e. management intervention.

My current manager works like that and I'm perfectly fine with it. The only issue that I can see is that said manager might drastically misunderstand the scope of things at hand. But so far I haven't met anyone like that.