Back in March, IBM’s accounting department told the company’s 4000, 000 plus employees that it would no longer reimburse them for charges incurred from using Uber’s taxi services, according to an exclusive report in Yahoo Finance.
The reason, IBM felt that the service was unsafe to use. Given the many complaints about assaults and rapes at the hands of Uber drivers around the world it would be hard to blame IBM for this policy.
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But the company quickly backtracked after Max Black, a 26-year-old global business consultant based in New York City, began an internal campaign against the move.
“I don’t think anyone even knew to stop expensing it, ” Black explained to Yahoo. It was hard to find because the change was buried within the company’s guidelines.
So what did Black do? He wrote a blog about it, of course.
He wrote, “We are being hypocritical. IBM is in the business of preaching mobility transformation to its clients, but we are effectively outlawing for our employees one of the best examples of mobile innovation out there.” This was part of a posting headed “Global IBM petition to bring back ridesharing reimbursement, ” that Black added to IBM Connections, the company’s internal Facebook-like social network.
Black’s effort led to IBM changing the policy after only two weeks and only a day after Black’s posting.