As a culmination of learning for The Portland MBA, students showcase their breadth of skills by completing a six-month capstone consulting project. Teams work collaboratively to solve problems for organizations like local coffee roaster Nossa Familia, community nonprofit Adelante Mujeres or global bike pioneer Yerka. Joe Desmarais worked closely with Youlen Ghazalian, Kristen Currens and Nicole Spencer on a sustainability project with the City of Portland, which served as an important stepping stone for his career preparedness and advancement.
The City of Portland was exploring how to best transition their vehicle fleet to green technology to meet key sustainability benchmarks. The capstone team was hired to create a solution to determine when the time was right to swap out combustion engines for electric vehicles, how much it would cost, and project the availability of new technologies.
An enriched professional network
Building a team and selecting an organization for the final capstone project are strategic ways students can enrich their network with experts in their field and design a project scope based on individual professional goals. Based on their shared interest in green technology, instructor Dave Garten matched the team with his contact at the City of Portland. Their proposed deliverables were a financial model, an emissions model and a projection for transition time. “We thought that was a project we could work with,” says Desmarais.
An engineer by training, Desmarais didn’t have a lot of experience in the field, so he was glad to collaborate with teammates and advisors who had more familiarity with sustainability. “I was fortunate to work with people who had worked in an environmental field to really understand what the challenges were before we dug in deep,” says Desmarais. “We also had a great advisor, Bill Jones, who has worked for a long time as an environmental consultant and who has a wealth of information.”
Developing executive presence
Desmarais and his capstone team were drawn to working with the City of Portland because of the opportunities to leverage their advanced leadership skills in sustainability and innovation. “We were looking for something that would be meaningful,” says Desmarais. “We wanted to make sure whoever we were helping could actually make a difference. And it had to be achievable — something we felt like we could actually do.”
The Portland MBA curriculum has a focus on advanced leadership skills — including emotional intelligence and high-level strategic thinking — empowering leaders who have both vision and follow through. In the spirit of innovation, the capstone team offered the client three strategies for converting their fleet to electric by 2050. The first positioned Portland as a market leader for sustainable operations. The second was a “status quo” recommendation in which the City changes over the fleet when electric vehicles become cheaper than combustion engines. The third option mapped out a transition somewhere in the middle of early and late adoption. Desmarais shared that the team “also gave recommendations for challenges they would face and how to mitigate them.”
Leveraging a legacy
For over 50 years, The Portland MBA has offered unmatched opportunities to work alongside prominent Portland organizations on the cutting edge of sustainability, ingenuity and entrepreneurship. For Desmarais, the capstone project opened the door for an exciting career pivot. “I was employed throughout the whole MBA program in a totally different field — supplier-side manufacturing as an engineer,” says Desmarais.
After the project, Desmarais was hired as the City of Portland’s Green Fleet Analyst, serving as a consultant for purchasing new vehicles. “That was a big surprise! But I knew a lot about the client and was inspired by their leadership.”
Moving forward, he will serve as a catalyst to position Portland as a leader of sustainability, striving for net zero emissions by 2050. “I am basically preparing the City for electrification and setting the tone,” says Desmarais.