Most organizations do not fail because their strategy is wrong. They fail because they are asking the wrong questions. After 30 years leading brands through disruption, bankruptcy, and transformation, I have learned that crisis does not reveal your weaknesses. It reveals your assumptions.
By David McKillips, CEO, Topgolf International, 2026
I joined CEC Entertainment as President and CEO on January 21, 2020. Six weeks later, a global pandemic had closed every single one of our 658 locations. We were losing roughly 90 percent of our revenue in real time. Within months, we would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
I tell that story not because it is dramatic — though it certainly was — but because of what happened in the conversations that followed. In the weeks after the closures, as we were making decisions that would determine whether the company survived, I noticed something that surprised me. The most important questions we were asking were not financial. They were not operational. They were philosophical. We kept returning, in different forms, to the same question: what business are we actually in?
The answer you give to that question — not in a strategy document or a board presentation, but in the moment when everything is uncertain and the pressure is at its worst — determines almost everything else. We decided Chuck E. Cheese was in the memory business. Not the pizza business. Not the arcade business. The business of giving families moments they would carry home and talk about for years. Once that was clear, everything else — the restructuring decisions, the brand investments, the new concepts we launched, the international expansion we pursued — had a foundation to stand on.
“Crisis does not reveal your weaknesses. It reveals your assumptions. And the most dangerous assumptions are the ones you never thought to question.”
— David McKillips — CEO, Topgolf International
REINVENTION IS NOT A STRATEGY. IT IS A DISCIPLINE.
The word reinvention is used loosely in business. It tends to appear in annual reports and keynote addresses, where it functions as a synonym for change without carrying the actual weight of what change requires. Real reinvention — the kind that happens inside an organization under genuine pressure — is not a strategy you deploy. It is a discipline you either have or you do not.
I have observed this across multiple organizations and multiple categories of adversity. At Six Flags, I was part of the senior team navigating a debt restructuring while simultaneously trying to build new revenue streams and expand the brand. At CEC, it was a pandemic and a bankruptcy. In each case, the organizations that came through strongest shared a common characteristic: they were willing to question things that had never been questioned before. Not just the obvious targets — the cost structure, the real estate footprint, the product line — but the foundational assumptions that people had stopped thinking of as assumptions at all.
That willingness does not come naturally to most organizations. It requires a specific kind of leadership discipline, and it has three components that I have seen work consistently across very different contexts.
QUESTION ONE: WHAT BUSINESS ARE YOU ACTUALLY IN?
The first and most important question any leader can ask in a moment of crisis or transition is not “how do we fix this?” It is “what are we actually building?” These sound similar. They are not.
“How do we fix this?” keeps you inside the existing frame. It assumes that the goal is to return to the previous state. “What are we actually building?” opens the frame entirely. It allows — and in many cases requires — you to discover that the business you thought you were in is not the business that will sustain you going forward.
At CEC, the answer we arrived at changed the entire trajectory of the recovery. Once we understood that we were in the memory business, we launched a membership program that converted one-time visits into recurring relationships. We created Pasqually’s Pizza and Wings as a delivery-only virtual restaurant concept — meeting customers where they were rather than waiting for them to come to us. We built a Global Licensing and Entertainment Division to extend the Chuck E. Cheese characters across film, television, and digital platforms. None of these decisions would have made sense inside the old frame. Inside the new one, they were obvious.
“The most dangerous question in a crisis is ‘how do we fix this?’ It keeps you inside a frame that may need to be broken entirely.”
— David McKillips
QUESTION TWO: WHAT ARE YOU WILLING TO LET GO OF?
The second question is harder, because it requires honest reckoning with things that have worked in the past. Every organization in transition carries legacy assets — products, processes, assumptions, relationships, and habits that once created value and now consume it. The discipline of reinvention requires identifying these things and being willing to release them, even when they carry emotional weight.
This is genuinely difficult. The things that made an organization successful are also the things that generate the most internal resistance to change. The team member who built a process that no longer serves the business believes in that process. The leader who championed a product that has run its course is invested in its success. Managing that resistance — with honesty, with respect, and with clarity about why the change is necessary — is one of the most demanding aspects of leading through reinvention.
What I have found is that the clearer you are about the answer to the first question — what business are you actually in — the easier the second question becomes. When the destination is clear, the things that are not pointing toward it become easier to identify and easier to release. The problem most organizations have is not that they are unwilling to let go. It is that they have not been clear enough about what they are building to know what letting go requires.
QUESTION THREE: WHAT DOES THE STANDARD REQUIRE?
The third question is the one I return to most often, and the one I find most consistently absent from conversations about organizational reinvention. Once you know what business you are in, and you have released what no longer serves it, the question becomes: what does the standard of excellence in that business actually require?
This is where I see the most organizations make the most consequential mistake. They define reinvention as moving from one state to another — from struggling to stable, from old to new, from crisis to recovery. But reinvention is not a destination. It is a standard. And the organizations that come through transformation genuinely stronger than they entered it are the ones that set that standard at the highest possible level, regardless of what the circumstances seem to suggest is reasonable.
I have always operated from the belief that you should speak in superlatives — that the target should always be the best version of whatever you are building, not an acceptable version, not a reasonable version given the constraints, but the best possible version. That belief has been tested in every difficult period I have navigated. And what I have found, consistently, is that the organizations which hold to that standard in hard times are the ones that look back on those hard times as the periods that defined them.
“Reinvention is not a destination. It is a standard. And the organizations that come through transformation genuinely stronger are the ones that refuse to lower the bar when the circumstances seem to warrant it.”
— David McKillips
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR LEADERS TODAY
The environment most leaders are navigating in 2026 is one of compressing timelines and expanding uncertainty. Consumer behavior is shifting faster than most planning cycles can accommodate. Technology is restructuring cost structures and competitive dynamics across every industry. The pressure to demonstrate short-term results has never been more intense, and the temptation to manage to the moment rather than build for the future has never been more present.
In that environment, the discipline of reinvention is not a crisis response. It is a permanent operating mode. The leaders and organizations that will be most effective are not the ones that are best at stability. They are the ones that are most capable of questioning their own assumptions, releasing what no longer serves them, and holding a standard of excellence that does not yield to the pressure of difficult quarters.
That is a different kind of leadership than most organizations develop for. It requires a tolerance for discomfort, a commitment to honesty about what is actually happening, and a belief that the way through difficulty is not around it — but through it, at the highest standard you are capable of maintaining.
I have spent 30 years learning that. I am still learning it. But what I know with confidence, from having led through some genuinely difficult moments, is that the organizations which ask the right questions — relentlessly, honestly, at the level of their deepest assumptions — are the ones that come out the other side worth following.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David McKillips is the Chief Executive Officer of Topgolf International. He has more than 30 years of experience leading major entertainment, media, and theme park brands including Six Flags Entertainment, CEC Entertainment (Chuck E. Cheese), Warner Bros. / DC Comics, SeaWorld Entertainment, and Sesame Place. He holds a B.A. in Communication Studies from the University of Georgia and post-graduate certificates in Marketing and Finance from New York University.
