The ugly middle management?

I am sitting in a conference on Business Process Management right now. Including myself, there have have been four speakers that have proposed that, in many change initiatives, it is not middel management that hampers change. On the contrary, middle management often welcomes the attempt to improve things and is close enough to the operational business to know about shortcomings and improvement potentials.

Obviously, it seems to be between executive management and middle management where you can find the roadblocks. Senior managers, stating "This is a nice idea. Why don't you go ahead and work with it? And please, don't bother me too much with this stuff in the future!"

What is this supposed to mean? Is it rejection? Not really. Is it support? Hardly. In other words, it is worth nothing, but you are decoupled from executive management.