The CEO of a large Indian company has the latest PC in his room. You could call it a dumb terminal. It is switched on every morning and there is a custom-made screensaver that never fails to attract attention. But the monitor and the machine are not used; the CEO is a technophobe.

“I don’t need it,” he explains. “I have run this business on gut feeling for the past 20 years. I have run it very successfully. Yes, I know all the jargon. My secretary handles the e-mail. And if you are talking about number crunching, what are my three executive assistants here for?”

But soon these dinosaurs may well find their days numbered. The world is moving too fast for those who are scared of technology.

HR professionals realise they must marry techno-literacy with experience. This is not just today’s problem. Technological innovations will come at a faster pace. Those on the cutting edge now will find themselves behind the times when a new generation enters the workplace.

The traditional solution — and it’s not just for issues of technology — has been to send executives to development programmes. It is commonplace to pack off your marketing whizkid for a crash course in finance, especially when you feel that he could become CEO one day. But you can’t teach a forty-something about, say, the Internet in a two-week training package. The new solution, thus, is reverse mentoring.

Reverse mentoring is considered to be the brainchild of Jack Welch, former CEO of GE. In 1999, he told his senior executives — some 600 of them — to seek out the Internet and technology savvy among their juniors and learn from them.

“Reverse mentoring happens when the old fogeys in an organisation realise that they are not in touch with the future the way the twenty-somethings are,” says Alan Webber, co-founder of Fast Company. “And they take steps to learn.”

Traditional mentoring has a senior executive taking one of his juniors under his wing. In reverse mentoring, it is the junior who is imparting the knowledge.

It doesn’t always work. In the first place, the very nature of the relationship is anomalous. The senior person — much older — has to accept his ignorance. This is difficult. The junior executive has to teach, which makes him the superior in one sense. At the same time, he has to keep in mind that he is still way down the hierarchy. Often, it is quiet impossible, like teaching your grandfather to suck eggs.

Matt M. Starcevich, CEO of the Centre for Coaching and Mentoring, says that reverse mentoring works best when it is treated as a peer-to-peer rather than a younger-older relationship. It also helps if the learning process is a two-way street. You probably have a lot more to learn from your boss than he from you.

The nub of the problem is that reverse mentoring upsets the hierarchy, command structures and egos.

One solution, which has been tried by Wharton Business School, is to get the reverse mentors from outside the organisation. In this case, the school assigned graduate students to be mentors to senior executives. The drawback: though the students knew a lot about technology, they were less familiar with the executive’s and the organisation’s specific needs. An insider would have been more effective.

Reverse mentoring is undergoing some experimentation now with people trying out group mentoring and corporate wisdom teams. But they will all have the same problem: nothing will work until the old dog realises that he needs to learn new tricks.