You know how people talk about "soft skills"? Bringing people around to your viewpoint without straight up arguing with them is indeed a soft skill. If you're a PERL hammer you're going to go after most every problem with a PERL script, right? What if the manager 4 levels above you is a Python guy? Is he right? Is he wrong? Or does he just feel differently? What if he's a functional programmer instead? What if he's a LISP guy?

At some point you have to learn to appreciate other viewpoints and approaches to problem solving. You might want to argue things on strictly technical merits when someone 3 or 4 levels above you has completely different criteria to judge a solution. Maybe he sees less risk or less cost, maybe he just doesn't want to change the status quo. Maybe he simply sees a challenge to his authority.

There's a wide spectrum between being a politician and pleasing everyone and being a politician and working through a discussion and couching your position in a way the other person appreciates and accepts. But it's on you to figure out how to make that work, not them.