Mary D’Souza

Executive Committee

Mary D’Souza, Executive Committee, is the chief investment officer of Misha Investments and CFO & director of a biotech company. She is also an investor and senior advisor at Star Mountain and a board member of Community Access. Mary has extensive experience in investing and capital markets. She has 20+ years of private credit, equity, real-estate, fund investing, commercial, and investing banking and C-level operational experience through various senior roles at GE Capital, Dresdner Kleinwort Benson, and Four M Investments.

Prior to Misha Investments, Mary worked for three years at Four M Investments where she was chief investment officer and CFO for the family office. She was responsible for cash management, tax planning and investments in fixed income, equity, MLPs, preferreds, real estate, and funds.

Mary worked for nine years as a managing director at GE Capital Markets where she was responsible for establishing and running the junior capital business and helped set up the unitranche fund with Allied Capital (later sold to Ares). She built deep relationships with banks, private equity funds, hedge funds, distressed funds, mezzanine funds, insurance companies, BDCs, and other alternate sources of capital. She placed over $13 billion in volume and 150+ deals, which included acquisition financing, refinancing, recapitalizations, restructurings (Radnet, CCA), DIPS (Delta DIP), EXITS (Delta, US Air), amendments, and trading of loans.

Get the latest from WorkingNation

© Copyright 2024 by Structural Unemployment, LLC dba WorkingNation

Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.