Sabu Francis & Associates

Though we have one of the lowest staff turnovers in Navi Mumbai, occasionally people do leave - so it is difficult to give an introduction to everyone who is or was involved in SFA. Also, due to the Just-in-time employment system that we use, most of our employees are actually out there -- without really sitting with us physically in the same premises. Here are a few characters who are constant though:

Sabu Francis
Chief honcho. Does not believe in cabins, or shoes for that matter. But does a lot of kicking, especially to himself! You would find him pottering in front of or behind a computer somewhere in the office. The competition would want him to actually disappear into the woodwork, but he crawls out every once in a while to actually do some work, and a few other things. Like, he plays the guitar. For some strange reason, people generally believe his guitar more than him. He also makes a noise about playing drums. (Actually, some people think he makes the noise. Period) Recently he announced on FM radio that he would be cutting a CD, which we all have to wait and see - who knows, people may look incredulously at a CD sometime. He also plays the bass guitar, sings and composes - so he's not really in need of a band. And that is when he is not designing architecture, sculpting, or painting or writing software or plain writing or reading or teaching. He likes to be a non-conformist, and he does his best when nobody believes in him - which is quite often - and he's quite smug about it all. Whatever you do, do not let him talk about his software. It may actually improve the software!

Baburaj Francis
Marketing manager, with varied experiences from many, many different backgrounds --right from organising street plays, campagning for removal of superstitions in the villages of Maharashtra to the high-tech marketing campaign for IDBI; he has seen everything. The last thing he would tolerate is hype. So, if someone even breathes some rarified form of pompousness about TAD or whatever, he would sieve it through his walrus moustache!

The others:
Raphy, Santosh ...

Those who left, (and the time they were with us):
Vibha Nadkarni (nee Khandekar) (4 years), Yashoda Fernandes (nee Thadani) (4 years), Gopi (5 years), Unni (5 years), Kabir (2 years), Sucheta (2 years), Ganesh (3 years), Vijayan (4 years), Leena (1 year), Soyuz (3 years), Mohan Dasannacharya (4 years), Hardik Pandit (9 months), Kavita (3 years), Anjali (5 years), Pius Lazar( 12 years) ...

What makes us tick?
Our office believes in research oriented practice. This gives us an edge over the competition, because often our office is much more aware of what's to happen in the design and construction scene before others catch on. There is also a healthy mixture of the 'short-term' thinkers who are adept at working out problems that affect us on a day to day basis (like Raphy and Pius) and the 'long-term' thinkers (Nobs, Sabu) who chart out the overall course of the ship

Why did they give us the awards?
The 1991 JIIA award for excellence in architectural research was given to Sabu, on July 1, 1991. This is for the taxonomy that is used to peg all the design information in Architecture as practiced at SFA (hopefully, such a system would be adopted by others too) We have this boring ability to point out to people the various stupidities that may happen before they do occur. For example; we had warned our clients of the impending plunge in the real-estate market in India, at least a year before it actually happened. The gratitude from those who listened to us then are better than the theory awards...

How do we make our careers?
Like the old management dictum of 'Management by Wandering Around', people at SFA are also encouraged to 'Manage by Wondering Aloud' There is not a single idea that would be squashed down just because it sounded ludicrous. Every project designed by SFA had come about after a lot of brainstorming and lateral thinking. This is rich fodder for people to chart out their own careers within SFA. A good example would be Raphy Paul, who started out his career as a garage mechanic. He is now the deputy manager at SFA, well versed in financial packages, spreadsheets, etc. Most people who do leave SFA, do so after great reluctance; and the careers that they are pursuing outside SFA has been shaped by the attitudes developed at SFA.

Unfortunately, there is an upper limit on the physical growth of the office. We do not have any employment opportunities at SFA currently (Note date of this document). We believe in shorter deadlines, and we have belief in getting things done with lesser people than what is conventionally believed . We are not too keen on increasing the sheer size of the office just for the heck of it. But if you have an idea that you think is worth pursuing, and it can be slotted into SFA, then send us an email. Once the Web-Space department works out a new 'distributed' structure for SFA, (SFA people will be mainly working from their home via computers and the Internet. The main physical office space would be used for a conference room, and physical meetings would be done bi-weekly) then the situation may change and we may be able to rope in people from anywhere around the world.

How do we work together with other firms?
We are a small group of people. That makes us easy to integrate with others. Most of our projects succeed, because a part of us welds to the project at hand. Protocols are short-circuited. Skunkworks¹ are easily formed and the jobs are executed smoothly. We bring in outside consultants whenever required - and we do not have any prejudice towards or against any consultant. This makes the team self-balancing, as we can keep a constant vigil on the consultant's performance. We also submit ourselves to others scrutiny too.

For the Churchgate railway station extension project, we brought in Nabars, a team of architects and Industrial designers who had some theoretical knowledge of utilising railway property air-rights. We did not want to make a mistake by assuming that we knew the subject. Nobody asked us to do so, but we did it anyway because a project is more important than all of us.

We are not interested in any association with any firm who wants to use us for only labour. We want to contribute and we would welcome any enquiry where our unique capabilities are taken advantage of. India, especially Navi Mumbai, is opening up to mega-projects. It may be possible that there would be companies who want to encash on these projects and may require a liason office in India, who are intimate with the working methods here. SFA would be able to provide the necessary infrastructure and service, for these cases.

¹A skunkworks is a group of people who, in order to achieve unusual results, work on a project in a way that is outside the usual rules. See definition here. The term was also used in the examples given by Nancy Austin et at in their book "A passion for excellence"