What the Ridesharing Wars and Your Board Portal Have in Common

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This past week has been interesting for fans of ride sharing. Several reports are suggesting that the relationship between Google and Uber is quickly deteriorating. In late 2013, Google Ventures invested $258M of capital into Uber, and now Bloomberg is reporting that Google is planning on introducing a competing service.

The WSJ reports this has been “blown out of proportion.” Their source disclosed that Google is testing an internal carpool application, that they are not going to war. Rather, the “app that helps Google employees carpool to work, and the app isn’t associated with the company’s driverless cars program.”

The interesting fact here is David Drummond, Google’s Chief Legal Officer, is an active board member for Uber. Now the Uber board must determine what sort of role they want Mr. Drummond to assume given this potential conflict of interest.

Most of our organizations do not have board members with these types of conflicts of interest. I suppose it must just be a Google thing, recall Eric Schmidt once sat on Apple’s board. And that turned out, well, poorly. That aside, many boards do have members that may need to recuse themselves. For board administrators, keeping track of potential conflicts means that they must also produce customized books, a process that
demands careful attention to ensure compliance. This risk to the organization is high and could lead to future challenges.

With OnBoard, our secure board portal platform, the ability to exclude a board member is just a drop down away. Now you know recused members won’t be exposed to specific material or information within their board book.

Avoiding the challenges that can result from recusals is an important aspect of streamlining the book creation process, ultimately protecting organizations from unnecessary risk. This feature is available to all OnBoard customers and is our way of living up to our promise.