Your data is telling you where the money is.
Nobody is listening.
DECIDE: An AI-Enabled Framework for Mid-Market Leaders to Turn Data into Profit shows you where it is and how to extract it.
By Feliks Golenko | Published by Grammar Factory Publishing | 2026
It’s 2 AM on a Tuesday, and Sarah Mesner is still awake.
As CFO of a €65 million distribution company, she has been running Excel scenarios for the third night in a row. In six hours, she’ll face the board with a question she still can’t answer: why did margins compress three points last quarter?
She has theories. Customer mix shifted. Supplier costs crept up. Transportation expenses spiked. But she has conflicting spreadsheets from three departments, fourteen tabs of pivot tables, and no clear answer she trusts enough to present.
The irony keeps her awake: her company spent nearly €500,000 on a Business Intelligence system that produces forty-seven different reports. When the board asks a hard question, she’s back to spreadsheets.
If you’ve ever been Sarah, or managed someone who has, you know this isn’t one CFO’s long night. It’s the reality for most leaders in mid-sized companies: drowning in data, starving for insight.
DECIDE was written to end that.
The problem isn’t your data.
It’s the gap.
The Implementation Gap
Traditional BI was too expensive, too slow, and too complex for companies without enterprise budgets. Most mid-sized companies either never started or started, spent six figures, and got dashboards nobody uses.
The Human Hurdle
Even when BI technically worked, people didn’t act on it. They didn’t see the insights. They didn’t know what to decide. The system ran. The behavior didn’t change.
AI Collapsed both barriers
What used to cost €500,000 and eighteen months now costs a fraction and takes weeks. The window of competitive advantage for companies that move now is open, but it won’t stay open forever.
What you’ll walk away with.
This is not a technical manual. It was not written for data engineers. It was written for leaders (CFOs, CEOs, Heads of Controlling, COOs) who know data should give their business an advantage, but haven’t seen that advantage materialize.
By the end of DECIDE, you’ll have:
A clear understanding of why BI initiatives fail, both the technical failures and the behavioral ones, so you can avoid repeating mistakes that have cost companies millions.
A mental model for what a truly intelligent organization looks like, the four layers of AI-driven Decision Intelligence, and the path to getting there.
A practical six-step methodology you can apply immediately: the DECIDE Framework, built from 35 years and 1,500 projects.
Realistic expectations about timeline, investment, and milestones, so you can make informed decisions and track real progress.
Confidence that better decision-making is achievable now, not someday with unlimited resources, but with what you actually have.
—about the book
The essentials.
Title
DECIDE: An AI-Enabled Framework for Mid-Market Leaders to Turn Data into Profit
Author
Feliks Golenko
Publisher
Grammar Factory Publishing (an imprint of MacMillan Company Limited)
Published
2026
Format
Hardcopy + eBook
ISBNS
Paperback 978-1-998528-79-0 · eBook 978-1-998528-80-6
About Feliks Golenko
Feliks Golenko has spent 35 years working on Business Intelligence with mid-sized companies across DACH. More than 400 companies. More than 1,500 projects. He founded MultiBase in 1991 and has worked with two clients continuously for over 30 years.
He is not writing from theory. He writes from the trenches, from companies with real constraints, real skepticism, and real pressure to deliver results.
DECIDE is the distillation of everything he has learned about what actually works and why most BI projects fail.
Find out what’s hiding in your data. Start with Chapter 1.
Chapter 1 of DECIDE lays out the core argument: your data already contains profit you’re not extracting, not because the data is bad, but because nobody has asked it the right questions in the right sequence.
- The real reason most BI investments don’t pay off (it’s not the tools or the data).
- The shift from data-first to decision-first thinking, and why it changes everything.
- The foundation of the DECIDE Framework, explained in plain language.
No jargon. No upsell. Just the clearest thinking I’ve done on a problem I’ve watched companies wrestle with for 35 years.
No spam. No drip campaigns. Just Chapter 1. Unsubscribe any time.
Your data already knows. Do You?
A Gameplan Session is 30 minutes. You tell me what’s going on in your business, where the data is, where the decisions are getting stuck, where you suspect margin is leaking. I’ll tell you honestly what I see.
No pitch. No obligation. Just a clear-eyed conversation with someone who has done this 1,500 times.
