Books
That data is a capital allocation decision, not an infrastructure problem — and that the cost of getting it wrong is paid quietly, in other people's hours, for years before anyone names it.
The series
A fable and the notebook underneath it. The story of one company's four years, told twice — once from the outside, once from inside the handwriting of the person deciding.
What Data Really Costs
Lior Barak
The story
2026 · Data Is Capital
A Business Fable About Capital, Leadership, and the Operating Model Between Them
A CEO has funded a data team for four years and still cannot say what it returned. Three data leaders have come and gone. A €400,000 incident finally forces the question nobody in the building had been able to phrase. The story is the argument.
About the fable →Behind the Scenes
Lior Barak
The working notes
2026 · Data Is Capital
Eleven Twenty-Minute Questions About the Data Budget — and What Each Answer Cost
The notebook she kept while she fixed it. Sixteen entries written in the middle of the thing, with the objections she never resolved still marked open, and the eleven questions she found herself asking.
About the notebook →Earlier
Written six years before the series, and still the shortest way into how I think about this.
Data is Like a Plate of Hummus
Lior Barak
Where it started
2020 · The Hummus Club
A practical philosophy of data strategy for non-technical leaders
The first book. Why a data strategy behaves like a shared plate at the centre of a table — everyone reaching in, nobody agreeing on what was ordered — and what a leader can do about it without becoming a technologist.
About the book →Reading them is optional. The question underneath them is not.
What does your data function cost the rest of the company — not in invoices, but in the hours other teams spend working around it?