Lior Barak · A Business Fable · 15 Years Inside Data
What Data Really Costs
Three data leaders. Four years. One CEO who finally stopped paying for it.
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- Why your third Head of Data will leave for the same reason as the first.
- The kitchen test: how to spot which dashboards to retire this quarter.
- How to talk about data spend the way you talk about every other capital decision.
Prefer digital? Read the Kindle edition on Amazon →
- 15 yrsinside data orgs
- 4,200+LinkedIn readers
- Zalando · idealoscale-up track record
- 200+CEOs and founders advised
- Berlinships worldwide
The Pattern
Does this sound familiar?
Three data leaders. Same company. Four years. Each one diagnosed the same problem. None of them fixed it.
€2M invested in data infrastructure. The board asked what it produced. Nobody in the room could answer.
Fourteen active projects, three engineers, a team reporting the same problems every retro. Nothing changed.
Sarah Chen lived all three. This is the story of what happened when she stopped delegating and started owning.
Read it first
The first two chapters are on the house.
"The invoice arrived on a Tuesday. €89,000. The consultant had done exactly what she had hired him to do. Sarah approved it without hesitation. She meant it."
Prologue plus Chapter One. 48 minutes. No email gate, no paywall. If it doesn't grip you by the third scene, the rest of the book won't either.
What This Book Is
This Is Not a Data Book
This is a book about capital allocation, leadership, and the operating model that sits between your people and your technology.
Written as a business fable, it follows Sarah Chen, CEO of a European e-commerce company, through the crisis that forced her to see data differently. Not as architecture. As a portfolio. Not as a tech problem. As a leadership gap.
You will not find frameworks explained in chapters. You will find them discovered, through conflict, failure, and the messy reality of organisational change.
If you are a CEO, founder, or business leader who suspects your data investment is not producing what it should, this book will show you why. And what to do about it.
For the Reader
What Is Inside
A 100,000-word business fable you will actually finish, because it follows people, not frameworks
Five concepts embedded in the story: Run vs. Build, FTE Debt, the Enabler Trap, the Portfolio View, and CDSI, the Capacity Drain & Shift Index
The financial lens most data books ignore, because data decisions are capital decisions
A protagonist who starts where you are: overwhelmed, unsure, and tired of consultants who explain without solving
Running a data team now and want the framework before the book? liorbarak.com/method →
The companion volume
Behind the Scenes
The notebook Sarah kept while she fixed it. Sixteen entries, and eleven twenty-minute questions about the data budget.
See the companion notebook →
Meet Sarah Chen
"I kept hiring brilliant people and watching them fail. Then I realized: the system was designed to make them fail."
Sarah Chen is the CEO of a European e-commerce company who has just lost her third Head of Data in four years. Each one was smart. Each one burned out. Each one left behind the same unfinished projects.
This is the story of what happened when she stopped blaming people and started examining the system. What she found changed everything. Not just about data, but about how she led.
Before you order
Questions you probably have
The book came out on July 15, 2026 and is shipping now. Amazon orders follow their usual delivery window. Signed copies ship from Berlin, normally within a few days of your order. You get the Prologue and Chapter One by email the moment your order is confirmed.
About the Author
Lior Barak
Lior Barak has spent fifteen years working inside data organisations, not consulting from the outside, but building, breaking, and rebuilding the functions that run on data.
He has worked across European startups, scale-ups, and mid-sized enterprises. He has sat in the room where the CFO asks the question nobody can answer. He has been the person in that room who could not answer it. He has also been the practitioner who ended up in a hospital at 3 AM, wondering whether the work was worth it.
What Data Really Costs is the book he needed fifteen years ago and could not find. He writes about data, capital, and leadership for 4,200+ readers on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/liorbarak.
Secure your copy before July 15
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What Data Really Costs
A Business Fable · Lior Barak
Sold and shipped by Amazon · Kindle available worldwide
Ships worldwide via Amazon. Signed copies ship from Berlin.