The Auction Block : A Novel About Data, AI, and What Most Teams Get Wrong
Overview
The AI demo got applause. It also made the product worse - and cost $200,000.
The new AI model scored 92% accuracy in testing. On real customers, it collapsed to 31%.
And the data underneath it all? Nobody could say which of it could be trusted.
That's what Sarah Chen was up against at ClassicMotors.io - a company racing toward AI on a foundation that couldn't hold its weight.
Less than four years later, ClassicMotors was worth $1.2 billion.
Sarah didn't get there with shinier AI or more dashboards. She got there by learning how to pay attention to the right problems - and by building a team that could keep paying attention without her.
The Auction Block is a business fable in the tradition of The Phoenix Project and The Goal - a fast-paced story about what happens when a data-driven organization stops measuring everything and starts deciding something.
Through Sarah's journey, you'll see:
- Why AI initiatives that shine in demos often fail in production
- Why your data isn't AI-ready until you can map it - and trust it
- How vanity metrics quietly replace strategy
- How incentives - not talent - create organizational friction
- Why having more data can be more dangerous than having too little
The story is followed by four leadership essays: the real-world frameworks behind the fable, drawn from 25 years of building data and analytics teams.
This book is for you if you:
- Lead analytics, data, AI, product, operations, or transformation teams
- Feel pressure to "go faster" without fixing underlying friction
- Have dashboards, OKRs, and roadmaps - but still struggle to change outcomes
- Suspect the problem isn't your people, but the system they're working in
The lessons in this story aren't limited to analytics teams. They're for anyone who's ever mistaken a beautiful report for a strategy - or wondered why their organization has all the tools and none of the momentum.
This is a story about data in the age of AI.
But at its core, it's a story about learning what deserves your attention - and acting on it.
This item is Non-Returnable
Customers Also Bought
Details
- ISBN-13: 9798247070689
- ISBN-10: 9798247070689
- Publisher: Independently Published
- Publish Date: February 2026
- Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.61 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.8 pounds
- Page Count: 268
Related Categories
