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Evolving Equipment at Easton

Batting 1000 with Easton’s new ghost bat

Batting 1000 with Easton’s new ghost bat
When Easton needed a game changer to regain its lead in the baseball and softball market space, its research & development teams went to work redesigning the bat from the ground up. The combined efforts of product engineers and marketing managers who understood the technical and experiential aspects of the equipment led to the creation of the ghost bat.

After a competitor edged Easton Diamond Sports out of first place for market share, the world’s leading manufacturer of baseball and softball equipment decided it needed to try something different in order to regain its top position in the space. The result was the ghost development project, a reconceptualization of one of the sport’s most essential components: the bat.

The project would call for the unified effort of roles with widely different skill sets to come together, from marketing managers to project engineers.

Julie Tobyansen works as the softball sports marketing manager at Easton Diamond Sports. “I work closely with professional players, making sure the product is feeling right, performing right, sounding right,” says Tobyansen. 

Tobyansen tells us that she began playing softball when she was about 8-years-old. “Early on when I fell in love with the sport of softball, I was playing it a ton.” Tobyansen says. “It was something that I truly loved to do, and I couldn’t really see myself or my life really any different than that.”

She kept up with the sport throughout middle school and high school via travel ball and competing in exposure tournaments, and she was ultimately offered a full scholarship at UCLA. By her senior year, her team won the national championship, and Tobyansen went on to intern at Easton. “Working at a company that made products for the sport that I played really felt like a seamless fit for me,” she says.

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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.