Management has never been widely regarded as a thrilling or exciting activity. The disregard is based on lack of knowledge. Only a minority of people have direct experience of what management entails, what managers are like, and what an enormous difference they can make in the world.
But surely the excitement quotient has risen in the 20th and 21st centuries? Management is above all the consolidation of opportunity - and there's no argument with the proposition that the number and scale of opportunities have grown with a power and speed that managers seemingly must follow.
Yet listen to these five words: 'Management is out of date'. The writer goes further to explain that 'like the combustion engine, it's a technology that has largely stopped evolving, and that's not good'. When a guru as famous as Gary Hamel makes such a statement, it's time to sit up and take notice. It's also time to worry.
Hamel argues that the obsolescence of current management results from lack of meaningful evolution - that you may be failing to take advantage of a unique moment in history, the point where galloping pace of change opens the door to revolution, to new kinds and ways of organisation.
The pace of development is so brilliantly fast that new product generations are being completed when earlier ones are being launched. As for people, you can't wait around for newcomers to learn the ropes. They work in a new climate of speed, early achievement and rapid advance that is far ahead of the traditional method of slow and steady advance towards the top.
The lessons of the new management are not that difficult to grasp and exploit. Yet if you want evidence of widespread adoption on new technology to pioneer and establish new management methods, what do you find?
Take contacting a company for customer service as an example of gross neglect. Every reader must have experienced today's reality. If you've been lucky enough to find the right e-mail or telephone number or even department, getting a human being to speak to you is impossible. Instead you are confronted and often confounded with inexpert automation.
The tragedy is that this is one area of mismanagement which directors can penetrate at ease - by picking up their phones and going through the same awful experience as their customers. But it's a long-standing silent tradition of management that it's wrong to sample your own products or processes; presumably because learning the truth might force you into spending money and time on improving the operation.
As they age, most managers, like most men and women, get still more unwilling to learn new lessons, master new practices and practise what they preach. That's sad for them, and just as sad for the people whom they lead - or try to lead.
Upheaval in society is being matched by generational change inside the organisation. The corporate young shouldn't be so corporate as their seniors and certainly shouldn't be boring. But if they live and work within a boring business, led by boring people, everybody loses.
Management that keeps up with the pace of change will win great prizes - including the satisfaction of being neither bored nor boring, but leaders of a new era.
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