Reinvention often comes in spurts, after a long period of silence. Just as modern architecture recently enjoyed a comeback, brand architecture, a field with well-established principles for decades, is back in the limelight.

Simply understood, brand architecture is the art and science of structuring the portfolio to meet your strategic goals, defining the brand number, scope, and relationships needed to compete. Just as Modern Architecture prioritized function, a Brand Architecture is only as good as it is well-suited for the purpose it strives to achieve. Given the disruption observed today across industries and segments, it’s no wonder that companies are considering structural rather than topical solutions to the challenges they face.

Yet the context in which brand architecture decisions are being made has changed. Gone are the days of “competitive strategy”, with the military-inspired view of competition as a zero-sum game, where market share needs to be stolen from competitors, often in a street-by-street battle to win over each individual segment. The type of brand architecture required to win in this game demanded a dogged focus on each segment, and a sniper-like collection of individual brands sharply focused on each one. While there was always a place for a variety of architectures — see Joachimsthaler’s brand relationship spectrum — houses of brands were favored, as it enabled segment-by-segment competition and risk protection. P&G was the king of houses of brands, slicing and dicing the market not just by products and demographics, but also by psychographics, price range, buying patterns or attitudes. In B2B, houses of brands were omnipresent, with a product-driven logic that led to branding new features meant to provide short-term competitive advantage.

In today’s day and age, companies like Google or Amazon do not pursue growth through incremental market share gains; rather, they focus on understanding their customers’ needs and creating entirely new markets to answer them. Creating a house of brands for these markets would be folly — not only would each brand need to be created from scratch, increasing the already significant investment, but the new category itself often needs to be explained to consumers, compounding the cost.

Instead, investing in a strong master brand-led architecture and putting multiple if not all brands under the leadership of a strong brand, presents numerous advantages. First, mergers and acquisitions, or partnerships, are making it necessary to bring multiple market participants to “the same page” — and this common ground often involves a master brand recognized by all. Second, the risk profile of a “branded house” architecture has changed: the master brand can create an aura of innovation and risk-taking, supporting the launch of new products. Third, investments can be streamlined, as a strong master brand can be leveraged across markets and product launches. Finally, a track record of success in creating new categories can create goodwill, creating a virtual circle of success. To achieve this, brand architecture does not need to be a pure “branded house” — in many cases, a strong master brand creates substantial leverage and a much cleaner portfolio, even as a few particularly strong brands can continue existing as sub-brands. An example of this is Salesforce, that leverages its master brand consistently — yet allows more independence to a few specific sub-brands, such as Pardot.

There are 3 key imperatives to build this type of brand architecture — to be clear, meaningful and stretchable.

: Just as modern architecture thrives on clear and clean lines, so does brand architecture. In the age of micro-segmentation, micro-targeting, information overload and digital fragmentation, you need a clear and loud voice in order to stand out. In the context of short attention spans where specific moments and needstates need to be targeted in addition to consumer/customer profiles, multiple brands often lead to confusion. The technology space understood this early, where clear and simple architectures that bring together simple design, as Apple, with complex technology, as SAP — always under the discipline of a rigorously simple way to organize.

In addition, one of the key reasons for the regained popularity of clean, streamlined architectures, often organized around a single master brand, has been the emergence of platforms, or 2-way marketplaces structured around mutual value creation. By definition, bringing various stakeholder groups to one 

, in order to enable network effects so critical for building scale. As Uber expands into different marketplaces and “uberizes” different industries, leveraging the power of its master brand is likely to lead to faster expansion than building a targeted brand for each industry from scratch.

: Just as modern architecture prioritizes function over embellishments, a solid brand architecture is founded on brands and values meaningful to consumers (or customers), rather than product feature distinctions. Brand architecture needs to be re-organized around brands that have a “reason for being” compelling enough to elicit passion, and introducing a clear distinction between brands that merit air time with consumers vs. “clutter”. The “decluttering” trend is gaining traction in brand architecture — just as in the popular consumer “decluttering” technique, only brands that “bring joy” to consumers get the spotlight. TED, for example, leverages the powerful TED master brand, positioned around “ideas worth spreading”, in a set of sub-brands that target meaningful occasions and contexts for intellectual exploration (TED Talks, TEDx, TED-Ed, TED Prize, TED Fellows, TED Institute, TED Radio Hour).

: Modern architecture is dynamic — it finds its force in the midst of usage; movement is often embedded into its very bones. In today’s fast-changing world, brand architecture is a moving target — clients increasingly ask to design architectures that fit their growth ambitions, thinking through future growth scenarios and architecting space for the future product pipeline. In particular in industries undergoing disruption, where next generation products aim to upset the status quo, their addition to any brand architecture may require a fundamental rethink.

Much as strategy has become “real time” as the window for strategic planning has shortened, brand architecture is also becoming more “real time”, requiring more frequent reassessment, adaptations and flexibility as markets change. Witness the frequency with which Uber readjusts its portfolio. WeWork, the popular co-working space, also exploits the strength of the master brand to stretch into near-in categories such as hospitality with WeLive or the ventures space with WeWork Labs.

Traditionally, companies considered a house of brands architecture as a risk management tool — a way not to put all your eggs in one basket. It turns out, in the age of platforms and digital disruption, a masterbrand-led architecture can help you build a bigger basket, to hold more eggs.

Architectural Engineering Wonders of the modern era for your Inspiration

In a world of back-to-back meetings, hellish commutes, and cramped workspaces, we have normalized serious issues like burnout, depression, and anxiety.

Our reasons? Productivity and hustle. But the irony—it’s 

 by taking care of our minds that we become manifold effective and keep burnout at bay. To quote 

“There are both physical and psychological benefits of leisure time, with reduced levels of stress, anxiety, and depression; improved mood; and higher levels of positive emotion. They also lower cortisol levels, blood pressure, and heart rate.”

I want to share 5 such activities — but unlike the cliché ones, I won’t tell you to meditate or stroll. I’ll give you rarely-talked-about ones.

Sinking Into Your Chair and Relishing the Setting Sun

There’s something soul-stirring about the orange sun receding into the horizon — the setting of the mighty 

 signals closure and reminds you to rest.

Add a lean-back chair into the mix and you’ve got a treat. Whenever I shut my laptop and relish this, time screeches to a standstill — peace, calm, and the ever-present beauty of the 

As my solar buddy disappears and I return to work, I brim with positivity, focus, and energy.

Don’t worry if you don’t have a sun view.

Star-gazing, admiring the shifting clouds, or even observing the barking mongrels, passing vehicles, and chirping birds will work. As time-management expert Selin Malkoc says,

“The key to enjoying your leisure activities is to live in the moment as much as possible.”

May God bless the person who invented the showerhead — a hot shower is my omnipotent “reset” button.

Procrastinated for 2 hours? Lacking the motivation to write? Feeling lethargic? No matter what, post a hot shower, I’m a 

 of benefits — better sleep, healthier skin, reduced headaches, relieved bodily tension, and stress evaporation. With a scented body wash or oil, this climbs up another notch.

If you’re looking for a jolt of mental energy and alertness rather than a calm mind recharge, go for a cold shower instead.

It’s been over a year since I stopped watching TV, streaming platforms, and anime. But now and then, I’ll land on the sofa and bear through some TV just for the family time.

Most often, the TV becomes a background noise

 — thanks to our chatter and laughter filling the living room. If it gets silent, I’ll get back and even a small such interlude leaves me burning with energy.

“At the end of your life, you’ll never regret not having passed one more test or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a friend, a child, a parent.”


You don’t even need full-blown family time — crossing over to your brother’s room for 5 minutes, visiting your mom in the kitchen, or checking on your half-dozing half-reading grandma is enough.

A short positive circuit breaker is all you need.

Reading has become synonymous with non-fiction, mainly self-help. But fiction is as if not 

While powerful characters and storylines with profound messages transform you from deep within, light-upbeat stories cure the darkest of moods and worries.

” or reading therapy is actively used to reduce mental health issues.

My go-to is fantasy fiction — when you’re teleported to surreal worlds, mundane earth’s vagaries disappear. My top 4 picks would be The Emperor’s Soul, The Final Empire, Assassin’s Apprentice, and Lord Of The Rings.

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”
— 

Don’t have one? Go for the keyboard. Classical much? The flute’s waiting for you. Have a lot of space to spare? A piano won’t complain.

Listening to music is widely recommended as a leisure activity, but playing music puts it to shame — deeper empathy, higher self-esteem, better memory, sharper focus, and protection against age-related brain degeneration.

One 6-month study whose subjects started learning the drums found white matter tract improvements—the brain parts that control the speed of neural transmission. Another linked long-term playing to significant positive neural changes. There are tons of other studies as well.

This is as much a reminder to brush the dust off my guitar as it is a piece of advice for you. Now that I’m done with this article, let me go strum some strings.

“Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything.”

5 Effective Brain Recharging Activities No One is Talking About

“What’s the meaning of life?” is a cliche philosophical question, but it touches on something fundamental about how humans relate to the world around them. People want to know that there’s significance to their lives, but not necessarily in any grandiose sense. Most of us just want to feel that there’s value in getting up and being active each day. We search for signs that our existence is a net good in the world, even if only on a minuscule scale in the grander scheme of the universe.

In the past, researchers have identified 

 underlying “meaning in life”. The first is 

, which refers to an ability to make sense of what’s happening in our lives as we build a personal story. The second is 

, which is the feeling that we’re working toward important life goals. The third is 

, which is the belief that our lives matter in the wider context of the world around us.

However, new evidence is revealing an overlooked construct, and it may be the most crucial one of all. Researchers are calling it “experiential appreciation”, and it refers to enjoying and appreciating sensations as you experience them — a concept that you may already recognize if you’re familiar with mindfulness.

 (February 2022), researchers probed what it means to experience meaning in life. In their first study, they analyzed past survey data from over 11,000 people across 30 countries. These surveys were originally designed to assess coping strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the researchers plucked out individual questions linked to meaning-in-life constructs. Here’s an example for each construct; participants had to rate their agreement with each statement or question below:

Coherence: “I’ve been looking for something good in what is happening”

Purpose: “I do something productive every day”

Mattering: “I’m doing what is good for our society”

Experiential appreciation: “I appreciate my life as it is right now regardless of the circumstances”

Meaning in life: “In general, to what extent do you feel that what you do in your life is valuable and worthwhile?”

The researchers analyzed the survey data, testing how each construct predicted people’s scores in the overall meaning-in-life measure. Consistent with previous research, the three traditional constructs (coherence, purpose, and mattering) all individually predicted meaning in life to some extent. The interesting part was that after accounting for those three constructs, the new fourth construct of experiential appreciation explained another significant portion of people’s meaning in life. In other words, a major ingredient in the meaning-in-life formula had been missed by previous researchers.

In a second study, the researchers developed their own way to measure experiential appreciation. For the three older constructs, they pulled specialized survey questions from previously published studies. But since experiential appreciation was a newcomer, they had to formalize its meaning and how to measure it. After some careful analysis, they ended up with five survey items. Anyone who scores highly on these items is high in experiential appreciation:

“I have great appreciation for the beauty of life.”

“I take great interest in my daily activities.”

“I appreciate a wide variety of experiences.”

“I appreciate the little things in life.”

“I tend to find myself deeply engaged in conversations with other people.”

Using these new measures together with the standard measures for the other three constructs, the researchers sent surveys to over 1500 people in the US and China. Instead of relying on indirect questions as they did in the previous COVID survey analysis, they collected dedicated data using well-tested measures for each construct.

Once again, higher purpose, higher mattering, and higher experiential appreciation all consistently predicted higher meaning in life. The effects of coherence were a little weaker, showing significant predictive power in the Chinese sample but not the American sample. While coherence was a little shaky, experiential appreciation certainly wasn’t.

So at least when analyzing the connections between all of these concepts, experiential appreciation wins a deserving place in the fight for meaning in life. But could you actually boost meaning in life by boosting experiential appreciation?

To answer this, the researchers came up with a way to stimulate people’s experiential appreciation: they showed everyone an awe-inspiring 2-min video from the nature documentary, “Planet Earth”. Few things in life give us a deeper connection to the present moment than sights of hypnotic oceans, lush forests, and David Attenborough documentaries.

The nature manipulation worked. Following the video, people reported higher levels of experiential appreciation. More importantly, by boosting their experiential appreciation, the video also indirectly raised how much people reported feeling a sense of meaning in their life. The researchers now had evidence of a causal connection between appreciating the moment and feeling that life is valuable.

 Here’s a simple wheel I’ve made to visualize the four elements associated with meaning in life according to the latest evidence. Think about how each of them applies to your own life. Feelings like “meaning in life” are incredibly subjective, but model-based thinking makes them less abstract and more practical. At difficult moments, work out where your problems might lie on this wheel. Where are your strengths and where are your weaknesses?

 The studies above show that experiential awareness is an important component of meaning in life. Here are two ways to practice it in your own life:

 Whether it’s a short walk through your local park or a bigger trip out into the wilderness, make regular time for interacting with nature. And when you can’t get out of the house, nature documentaries are a great fallback! Although the mechanisms are still unclear, there are several ways nature might benefit emotional wellbeing. For example, observing nature’s breathtaking beauty is like visiting the best art gallery on Earth. There’s a reason so many paintings represent natural scenes and landscapes. Since we evolved in the natural world, our psychology reacts to it in a profoundly positive way. Nature’s immensity also makes you feel connected to something bigger outside yourself. When you’re immersed in nature, you realize the grand world that you’re a part of. This puts some of your smaller daily problems into perspective. Finally, in nature, you’re exposed to calm and natural sensory stimulation. For city dwellers, this is a refreshing experience because the sensory stimulation you experience in a city is hectic and exhausting. Glaring ads grab your attention from the left, a pushy pedestrian grabs your attention from the right, and car horns grab your attention from everywhere else. Nature allows you to be more voluntary and relaxed about how your attention is drifting

 Experiential appreciation is all about living in the moment and focusing your attention on enjoying sensations as they happen. You can practice this ability with mindfulness techniques. If you’re interested in a good meditation guide, I enjoy the 

 meditation app. If you’re looking for a short read or listen, here’s a 

 — a pioneer in science-based mindfulness. Here’s a great quote from the piece: “The real meditation practice is the 24 hours itself — it’s life itself. It’s not sitting on a cushion in the cross-legged posture or lying in a yoga pose called the corpse pose or anything like that… we’re cultivating 

 so that we get more comfortable with living out 

 our moments as if they really mattered and therefore being there for them — the good ones, the bad ones, the ugly ones, the stressful ones, the difficult ones, the painful ones.”

14 Architectural Design Ideas for a Spacious Interior

Every Next Level of Your Life Will Demand a Different You

. The tech elite mean to leave us all behind.

I learned this when I traveled to a remote resort to deliver what was supposed to be a talk for a group of tech investors. It turned out to be something of a “consult” to five ultra-wealthy men on their apocalypse survival strategies.

The experience led to a much-circulated piece 

. But it also set me off on a multi-year journey to understand “The Mindset” leading the wealthy to believe that as long they have enough money and the right technology, they can break the laws of physics, economics, and morality to escape a disaster of their own making. They are preparing for a digital future that has less to do with making the world a better place than transcending the human condition altogether.

These billionaires once showered the world with optimistic business plans for how tech might benefit human society. Now they’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch. Will it be Bezos migrating to space, Thiel to his New Zealand compound, or Zuckerberg to his Metaverse?

This “out of sight, out of mind” externalization of poverty and poison trickles down through the Mindset to the rest of us; but the collateral damage doesn’t go away just because we’ve covered our eyes with VR goggles. The longer we ignore the social, economic, and environmental repercussions of our actions, the more of a problem they become. This, in turn, motivates even more withdrawal, isolationism, and apocalyptic fantasy.

The Mindset is based in a staunchly atheistic and materialist scientism, a faith in technology to solve problems, an adherence to biases of digital code, an understanding of human relationships as market phenomena, a fear of nature and women, a need to see one’s contributions as utterly unique innovations without precedent, and an urge to neutralize the unknown by dominating and de-animating it.

The technosolutionist future climaxes by uploading our economy to the blockchain and our minds to the cloud. We “level up” in the ultimate exit strategy. Like the plot of a Marvel blockbuster, the very structure of The Mindset requires an endgame. Everything must resolve to a one or a zero, a winner or loser, the saved or the damned.

This fatalist drive to rise above and separate from humanity is no more the result of runaway digital capitalism than its cause — a way of treating one another and the world that can be traced back to the sociopathic tendencies of empirical science, individualism, sexual domination, and perhaps even “progress” itself. But this Mindset can be denaturalized and replaced.

We must act as a counterculture to The Mindset, introducing circularity where they see only arrows, and more thoughtful, long-term thinking when they can only strive for escape.

Those of us who recognize that we’ve been here before are the ones who have to call attention to where we are heading. Today, that means acting as a counterculture to The Mindset, introducing circularity where they see only arrows, and more thoughtful, long-term thinking when they can only strive for escape. We still have choices.

Mine, was to chronicle my experiences with the tech elite over the years, and call out the ways in which our dreams for a better future too often involved externalizing harm to others, or ignoring today’s impacts for tomorrow’s promised gains. Just the announcement of this book has already led to the cancellation of two speaking events by sponsors who fear being associated with a critique of runaway exponential capitalism (which is what many of them are still trying to sell as a desired and attainable outcome). I take this as a good sign.

 or (better yet) asking your library to carry it. It’s being published by an 

, and in as friendly a fashion as possible. But more importantly, I’m hoping you’ll read it by any means necessary, and join me and others in imagining a better path forward.

We do not have to buy-in to the apocalypse for which these billionaires are actively preparing and, in some cases, they are 

 Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

. Rushkoff is a weekly columnist on Medium, and the author of books including

 Team Human, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Present Shock

, a graphic novelist, and a professor of media theory and digital economics.

This Bread Pudding Will Give You All the Fall Feels

I recently went to the mountains with my friends. We were celebrating 50 years of friendship. It was very special. Six of us were to be together spending time in the mountains.

I had never been to that place nor heard of the name. I was told by my friends that they had done all the bookings. I had to just pack and join them at the station.

Both are growing areas of apples, pears, apricots, almonds, cherries, and plums in Himachal Pradesh.

We were to go on the fast train called Shatabdi from Delhi to Kalka and the onward journey would be in an SUV called an Innova.

We reached Kalka and the cab was waiting for us. We were excited souls. We reached the mountains at 8.30 PM after a long and arduous journey and were even wondering whether it was worth it.

We reached our destination. It was calm quiet with the soft rustling winds whistling through the trees.

The clean neat guest house The Wheeler Lodge B&B looked amazing and inviting.

The host and the hostess at the Wheeler lodge were waiting to welcome us. The warm welcome we received from them made us feel very much at home. The hostess had a major kidney surgery which we did not know about. They did not cancel our booking having committed to it.

She smiled and was very soft-spoken. Their two children were equally warm and treated us with respect, happiness, and kindness.

They served us fresh food. We enjoyed the simple but tasty homemade food. The whole family served the food and kept us busy with anecdotes about the small village. I could see that they were all proud of their beautiful village.

They were humble and lovely as a family. We came to know that these young girls between the age of 10 and 13 walk 4kms to school every day on the steep elevated mountains. Winter and summer they bear it all. This makes the children hardy and strong.

The girls also help out at the two beautiful orchards that they possessed at the time of sowing and picking the fruit. The orchards had fruit trees of apples, apricots, almonds, and cherries.

Taking a round of the orchards I found that a large number of people were working there. I enquired whether these people were specially hired for the work in the orchard. While some of them were laborers that come in from Nepal and Bihar other people were owners of orchards who had come to help as they believed in helping the community and worked in each other’s orchards when the need arose.

The people looked happy and relaxed and completely tension-free. The air was pure. There was no pollution. It was cool weather. The village consisted of only 150 people who helped each other all the time.

The community experience was something like the Japanese Ikegai in that the community work gave each person a sense of belonging and a purpose to do some work together. People are happy and committed to each other. They work together in unison.

This purpose of life and good physical work keeps their bodies fit too. They sleep well.

In fact in the quiet village with pollution-free and pure air we all from big cities slept extremely well. Every night was refreshing.

People in the village were very patient. Farming teaches you a lot of patience. Once you sow the trees, it takes four years for the fruits to arrive. The trees last between 10–15 years giving fruit. Once the buds begin to flower it takes six months for the apples to be ripe and sold on the market.

During that time the farmers are free to do other jobs and patiently wait for a good crop.

I found cherries to be the most cumbersome. Each cherry had to be picked individually. If they hit the ground they would spoil the crop. It could neither be eaten nor kept. The crop gets wasted.

They are also afraid that the hail storm and other pests would spoil the crop. So all the trees are covered with nets.

The apple and pear trees are netted to avoid destruction from weather and pests.

People in this village live a long life. It is stress-free living there. The parents are highly respected by their children.

Even people in the community respect the elders and mingle with them and do their work.

In return, the old people offer life lessons storytelling and happiness to people.

Some cook excellent dishes and send them to the youngsters. This life is like a partnership between young and old.

Photo of the old lady who is so happy and stress-free. 

We met this lovely lady who was 92 years old. She was happy. She sang songs for us and made us dance around her. She laughed and told us anecdotes of her young years.

Before leaving Kumarsain she presented each one of us with a box of cherries. According to customs guests should not go empty-handed from your house. It is a gesture of love and goodwill to give them something.

The lessons about happiness that we learned from the people of the Kumarsain Village were the following:

To greet people with a lovely smile even though there is some inconvenience to you.

To make people feel welcome when they come to your house.

To have a common purpose in life. Community work shared with the purpose of being useful to other people helps in bringing happiness to your life.

Whatever you do in life requires patience to bring fruits to the effort made by you. Wait with patience to get rewards.

To spread love and happiness in the lives of people.

Being respectful towards elders and good exchanges between younger and old generations always helps in personal growth.

To live in a stress-free environment take a retreat in the mountains where you do not require anything but love and fresh air to live a good life.

Longevity is when life has less stress and more fun.

I Moved Across the Country and Never Looked Back

Sitting on a patio overlooking English Bay, I am eating dinner and talking with a woman I have met only hours earlier. A memorable evening for both of us, it will see us share some of the most difficult and personal memories we have. Details will be different, but the trajectory similar, in both our cases centered around death. Not one, not a few, but hundreds of deaths. For each of us.

Okay, one, don’t worry, we’re getting to the sunsets! And two, please be assured that despite what it sounds like, I do have appropriate boundaries. Because what I have just described is the life of an HIV researcher. In town for an annual research and treatment conference, it was three days of the latest science, prevention, and support findings. And meeting people like Leena, who, like myself, is a qualitative researcher, working exclusively with women who have contracted HIV from rape or abuse. While my field is HIV, PTSD, and stigma, we do share the same approach, which uses a narrative model of inquiry. Meaning, our data is the individual and community story of HIV. If you’re interested in reading more about what I do, check out the piece below.

Not surprisingly, we had a lot to talk about and found we had many things in common. Like, for example, sunrises and sunsets. For both of us, seeing them is inexplicably tied up in remembering loss from HIV. Something else she said really hit me. Originally from San Francisco, Leena talked about how HIV had literally torn her city apart. But then, oddly enough it became the shared history that helped it mend.

Last night as I watched the sunset you see above and below, I thought again of what Leena had told me about San Francisco, inspiring me to write the poem that follows below the next image.