The original comment said they were both on the board of United Way. Those are the votes he'd be curating. United Way, at the time, was the largest non-profit in the United States and it's mission was to funnel donations to "deserving" non-profits. Many companies, including IBM, had a payroll contribution you could make to United Way. The 'service' United Way provided was doing the research to avoid scam charities and non-profits. The old joke "I gave at the office" when a person comes to your door asking for donations, was in reference to giving to United Way and implicitly telling the solicitor that if they wanted a donation to go to United Way and convince them to give some of the donated money to their charity.

As a result, being on the board gave a person tremendous soft power by giving them a direct impact on whether or not they chose to fund a non-profit. The way that expressed would be trips and junkets "for free" for United Way board members as a means of attempting to persuade them to fund a given non-profit. So let's say your kid starts a non-profit and you want other board members to advocate for it being funded. You, as the parent, have a conflict of interest and so must recuse yourself from that decision, but others on the board do not. Having someone in that meeting you can count on to make a solid case for your kids non-profit is worth a lot.

Rich people giving advantages to other rich people is frowned upon as collusion and nepotism, but when you launder that through a giving non-profit and even better you get to use other peoples money, and avoid a whole passel of tax implications. Well who is going to complain that United Way is funding this non-profit versus another? They had so much money to give away it was no doubt easy to hide the less well supported donations from things like the Red Cross or mothers against drunk driving donations.

That's the game at this level.