Management has never really been accepted as an exciting or thrilling activity. However, this is mostly due to ignorance. Only a small amount of people have direct experience of what’s involved in management, what managers are like, and the massive difference effective management styles can make in the world.

However, the excitement quotient must surely have risen in the 20th and 21st centuries? What can management be if not the consolidation of opportunity? And there can be no argument with the proposition that the number and scale of opportunities have grown with a speed and power that managers must surely follow.

But the following five words from Gary Hamel strike at the heart of management today: “Management is out of date.” Hamel goes on to say that “like the combustion engine, [management is] a technology that has largely stopped evolving, and that's not good.” When a such a revered management guru as Hamel makes that kind of statement, it's time to sit up and take notice. It's also time to worry.

The irrelevance of modern management styles, says Hamel, has come about from a lack of meaningful evolution. Managers are allowing a unique moment in history to slip through their fingers – the point where the gathering pace of change could open the door to revolution and new types and methods of organisation.

So amazingly fast is the pace of change that new product generations are being completed when earlier ones are being launched. And when it comes to people, there is no time to wait around for novices to learn the ropes. They work in a new climate of speed, early achievement and fast tracking that is miles ahead of the traditional method of slow and steady movement towards the top.

The tenets of the new management should be simple enough to grasp and exploit. However, if you look for evidence of widespread adoption of new technology to pioneer and establish new management styles, you will be disappointed.

Contacting a company for customer service, for example, is a demonstration in gross neglect. By now everyone must know the reality of what passes for customer service in modern business. Even if you’re lucky enough to find the right e-mail, telephone number or even department, getting a human being to speak to you is virtually impossible. Instead you are confronted with a nightmare of inexpert automation.

Like most of humankind, the older they get the more unwilling managers are to learn new lessons, master new practices and practise what they preach. That's bad luck for them, and also the people whom they lead – or try to lead.

Change in society is being matched by generational change within the organisation. The corporate young cannot afford to be so corporate as their seniors and certainly shouldn't be boring. Everyone loses if they live and work in a boring business led by boring managers.

Great achievements can be made providing management styles keep pace with change – and there will be the satisfaction of being neither bored nor boring, but rather spearheading a new era.

For more on management styles, see http://www.thinkingmanagers.com/business-management/management-styles.php