Which Magical Creature Do You Want Your Business to Become? — 3 Giants · 3 Creatures · Quiz Funnel
Amazon · WeWork · Kodak — three global companies, three paths, and a quiz that shows which one you're walking right now
There's one question I love asking every business owner I talk to.
Not "How much will you grow this year?" Not "What's your revenue?" — but a question that sounds a little stranger:
"What do you want your business to become in three years?"
Most answers I get back are numbers. But numbers aren't an identity. Every business is always in the process of becoming some kind of Magical Creature — whether its owner realizes it or not.
In this article, I'll walk you through three companies everyone probably knows — Amazon, WeWork, and Kodak — three companies that once stood at the same crossroads your business may be standing at right now, yet walked away as three different creatures. By the end, you'll see all three paths clearly — why some businesses survive, some outrun themselves, and some sleep on their old success for too long — and at the end of this article I've prepared a free tool that tells you which Magical Creature your business is today, along with one Business Play you can actually put to work.
The Map from the Book: Journey of the Magical Creature
In How to Train Your Magical Creature, a book I'm currently writing, there are passages that fit this article perfectly. I drew a map of business on two axes — one is Investment Risk (how much of your money is at stake), the other is Predictive Business (how well you can forecast your business with data). By this logic, businesses don't differ merely in size — they differ in how they handle opportunity and risk at each stage of growth.
On this map live three main Magical Creatures:
🐪 The Camel — travels far across the desert, because it stores provisions (profit, cash) before picking up speed
🦄 The Unicorn — beautiful, fast, with opportunity filling the sky, but it usually runs faster than the provisions it carries
🦕 The Dinosaur — a sleeping giant with enormous power inside, not yet awake to read the signals around it
I'm not the only one who sees it this way. Alex Lazarow wrote in Harvard Business Review that most businesses, large or small, fit the "camel" logic better than the "unicorn" logic — if the first goal is to survive strong, and only then accelerate toward long-term success [1][2]
Your Magical Creature is not something you choose. It's already hidden inside your business's pattern of decisions, waiting for you to discover and train it. Think of it like a game of Snakes and Ladders: every right decision is a ladder, every wrong decision is a snake — and the squares on the board aren't time, they're the distance between you and the business you want to see.
The training order I stand by throughout the book is the camel's: Profitability first → then Customer → then Growth. Not because growth doesn't matter — but because growth without the first two underneath it is the longest snake on the board.
Now let's see how three global companies moved across this board.
Case #1 — Amazon: The Camel the World Mistook for a Unicorn 🐪
"Bezos vs Mr.Nobody." Many people remember Amazon as the legend of daring to lose money in order to grow — they see Amazon as a unicorn, and assume an ordinary company could never follow in Jeff Bezos's footsteps.
But read Jeff Bezos's shareholder letters starting from 1997 and a different picture emerges: yes, Amazon posted accounting losses for years — but what Bezos watched every quarter wasn't paper profit. It was Free Cash Flow and customer behavior data [3] Amazon invested heavily only when the data said the opportunity was really there — and the cash on hand could carry the weight of that investment.
Put simply: Amazon wasn't "taking bold risks." Amazon measured two forces before every investment — one is the size of the opportunity (read from the data), the other is financial readiness (read from the books). That is the habit of a true camel — one so large the world mistook it for a unicorn.
The lesson for small and mid-sized businesses: You don't need Bezos's money. You can apply the same logic to the budget you have — for example, before opening a new location, ordering a big batch of stock, or hiring more people, always ask the same two questions: How big does the data say the opportunity is? And how much can our cash actually carry? If you can only answer one of them, it's not time to move yet.
Case #2 — WeWork: ยูนิคอร์นที่วิ่งเร็วกว่าเงินของตัวเอง 🦄
In 2019, WeWork was valued at $47 billion — even though its actual business was leasing buildings long-term and renting them out short-term.
What went wrong? Here's how I'd frame it: the unicorn isn't the villain. WeWork's opportunity was real — the flexible-work trend was real, the demand for co-working was real. Aswath Damodaran calls this phenomenon a "runaway story" — a narrative so powerful it races ahead of financial reality and drowns out the most basic questions of the business [4][5] A mountain of long-term lease obligations stacked on volatile short-term revenue — a structure whose warning signs had been flashing in the financial statements all along. But the risk side was never measured as a number anyone listened to — the story was louder than the numbers.
And no matter how much Data Science or advanced predictive modeling a business uses, there is always room for uncertainty. If a fragile financial structure sits underneath that uncertainty, even a small deviation is enough to flip the whole business — like a unicorn running fast and beautifully, until one stone brings it down hard.
The lesson for small and mid-sized businesses: Any small business can become a miniature WeWork. Every time we expand locations, add inventory, or grow the team faster than real cash flow can carry — because the "story" of the opportunity is exciting — we're walking WeWork's path. The question to ask isn't "Is the opportunity real?" (it usually is). It's "If the opportunity arrives 12 months later than planned, does our cash last until then?"
Case #3 — Kodak: The Sleeping Creature That Could Be Woken — But Was Woken Too Late 🦕
This is the most painful story of the three, because Kodak didn't lose for lack of data, and it didn't lose for lack of technology.
Kodak's own engineer, Steven Sasson, invented the world's first digital camera in 1975. Market data, patents, engineering capability — Kodak held all of it before anyone else [6] What it lacked was a system to turn those signals into decisions — because every signal pointed against the film business that was still highly profitable. So the organization chose to keep sleeping, and missed the very wave of change it had seen before anyone else.
Let me be clear about the dinosaur here: on my map, the dinosaur is not an insult. It's the creature with the most accumulated power on the board — customer base, brand, cash flow, experience — it's simply asleep. Many businesses that have been profitable for 20–30 years are in this mode. And the good news is that a sleeping creature can be woken — as long as you don't let the signals pile up untouched for too long, the way Kodak did.
MIT research found that companies that genuinely use data to drive decisions show significantly better productivity and performance than companies that merely collect it [7] — managing by belief instead of evidence is the path by which strong organizations quietly decay without noticing.
The lesson for small and mid-sized businesses: The right question isn't "Do we have data?" — every business has data, sitting in the sales system, the books, the inventory. The right question is "When did our data last move a decision?" If you can't recall the answer, that's the sign your creature is asleep.
So What Is a Business Play?
The three stories you just read share one skeleton: a business's outcome is determined by how it weighs opportunity against risk in each decision. Amazon weighed both sides, so it was ready to charge when the data and the finances signaled together. WeWork weighed only one side, letting financial fragility pile up underneath. Kodak never picked up the scale at all — and slowly became its own past.
By now I'd guess you're asking yourself ,So which path is my business walking right now?
That's exactly why I built a short tool to answer it before you read on. 6 questions, 2 minutes, measuring the same two forces that decided the fate of the three giants above — how well you read opportunity from data, and how ready your finances actually are. It scores you on both axes and tells you whether your next big move looks more like Amazon, WeWork, Kodak — or a walk through fog, where neither force is being measured at all.
Every answer comes back with a short read on what that choice says about your business. You don't have to wait until the end.
👉 Which path is your business walking — Amazon, WeWork, Kodak, or fog? Free · No email required · Your answers stay on your device
This is what my team at Power Ladder and I have turned into a tool called the Business Play:
A Business Play is a set of business decision strategies — co-created by experts and AI — delivering scores and recommendations to capture opportunity and reduce risk in each business context.
We have many Business Plays — each designed to measure a different kind of opportunity and risk — and each tells you which Magical Creature your business is: 🐪 Camel · 🦄 Unicorn · 🦕 Dinosaur, or other creatures.
Today we have 15 Business Plays, each examining opportunity and risk through a different lens — some look at customers and LTV, some at brand and IP, some at cash and liquidity, some at data and technology. The three companies you just read about are three different Plays performing on the world stage.
And here is the point people most often get wrong, so let me stress it: the Magical Creature and the Business Play are two different axes. The creature is your business's identity right now; the Business Play is a strategy that shifts with the situation. For example, a healthy camel may be facing a WeWork-style situation in its own new business line, while a dinosaur may need a Play that wakes the organization up to read its signals again. There is no fixed formula that says "this creature must run this Play." Your situation — not your creature — chooses the Play.
Your Turn: What Do You Want Your Business to Become?
Amazon, WeWork, and Kodak answered this question differently. Some survived because they knew when to accelerate. Some fell because they accelerated before their financial base was ready. And some lost while holding the best cards in the game.
Now it's your turn — and the starting point isn't choosing which creature you want to be. It's knowing which Magical Creature you're actually riding right now. Because once you see your present identity clearly, your strategy starts from the truth of your business — not from the owner's dream of it.
We built the Creature Quiz for exactly this — free, and it takes only a few minutes: the first set of questions discovers which Magical Creature your business is (identity), then situation questions match you with 1 of 15 Business Plays that fits the challenge you're facing right now — you get the Play's name, a preliminary score, and a first step you can act on immediately.
If you want to go deeper, there are two more rungs on the ladder:
Creature Quiz — discover your Magical Creature + your Business Play, free
Business Play Snapshot ($49) — our experts analyze your quiz answers (no real financial statements required) and send back a report with recommendations within 48 hours
Discovery Consulting — for businesses ready to have our experts + AI go deep into your real data on Snowflake, with a 90-day plan
Your Magical Creature already exists — hidden in the data your business generates every day. The Quiz doesn't create a new identity for your business; it just helps you discover the one you have, clearly enough to make your next decision better.
[Take the free Creature Quiz — https://play.powerladder.tech/]
Power Ladder turns your business data into a Business Play that captures the opportunity and mitigates the risk.
Contact: dithanon@powerladder.tech · powerladder.tech
References
[1] Lazarow, A. (2020, October 16). Startups, It's Time to Think Like Camels — Not Unicorns. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2020/10/startups-its-time-to-think-like-camels-not-unicorns
[2] Lazarow, A. (2020). Out-Innovate: How Global Entrepreneurs — from Delhi to Detroit — Are Rewriting the Rules of Silicon Valley. Harvard Business Review Press.
[3] Bezos, J. (1997). Letter to Shareholders — "It's All About the Long Term." Amazon.com 1997 Annual Report.
[4] Damodaran, A. (2019, September). Runaway Story or Meltdown in Motion? The Unraveling of the WeWork IPO. Musings on Markets. https://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2019/09/runaway-story-or-meltdown-in-motion.html
[5] Damodaran, A. (2017). Narrative and Numbers: The Value of Stories in Business. Columbia University Press.
[6] Lucas, H. C., & Goh, J. M. (2009). Disruptive technology: How Kodak missed the digital photography revolution. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 18(1), 46–55.
[7] Brynjolfsson, E., Hitt, L. M., & Kim, H. H. (2011). Strength in Numbers: How Does Data-Driven Decisionmaking Affect Firm Performance? SSRN / ICIS 2011.
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