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I'm advising top management for a large corporation and can stress what others here mentioned as well: communicate often, in simple terms, and in written form

Executives have a lot on their plate and usually work on a wide variety of topics at the same time. Therefore try to help them when they have to switch context

Concrete example:

* create a (bi)weekly status report with four sections (achievements last week, focus this week, current risks/impediments, decision needs)

* to every risk add a measure (don't admire the problem but bring a solution)

* to every decision need add the alternative(s) (usually something like "Option A", "Option B", "Option do nothing") and show the pros and cons

* show your vision and achievements. Every manager has another boss and will need marketing material to advertise what an important kind of work is going on. Show what you are working towards ("We want to use state of the art AI to improve drug development") and where you stand right now ("We have built the foundation by creating a structured training data set with records of more than 1 million drug trials")

* use abstraction to simplify (not "we switched our legacy adapter from SOAP to REST" but "we switched to a future-proof interface integration")

Regarding the meetings, cancel enough to show you are busy but participate in enough meetings to stay on people's minds

Concrete examples to improve meetings:

* ask for an agenda for each meeting and for your expected contribution

* keep meeting minutes, send them around if no one else does that

* everything that is dicussed should be related to actions that have been undertaken (status update) or will be undertaken (next steps). Every action has to be assigned to someone and has to have a due date

* I mentioned it before, focus on solutions not on admiring a problem (not "no one is providing the data we need" but "We currently lack the data. Who can we contact today to get access to the research data?")

While I don't know whether this would have helped you in the case you described, these are some general points for management communication that offer a good return of investment from my perspective.