To be a Communications Manager?

Our ECT instructor is always explaining the relevance of ECT's to our future careers as "Communications Managers" - "As CM, you are going to have to manage people's expectations...as CM, you are going to have to deal with situations like this..."

I always feel a little underwhelmed by those statements. Although I appreciate the direct relevance of what we are studying, I feel we shouldn't be striving to be simply communications managers. We should strive to be leaders in our field, whatever the field is. Do we want to simply manage communications at our company, or do we want to lead the company to use communications technologies in the most effective ways? Do we want to manage the status quo, or stay on the cutting edge of technological innovation so that we keep our company one step ahead of the competition?

Perhaps I feel that by referring to ourselves as communications managers, we accept a more passive role in our future professions. I prefer to look at the future in a more radical, catalytic way. We're not doing this just to get paid, we're doing this because we are inspired by this field, and we are going to achieve great things.