"very few businesses are the product of a small subset of its people"

Hate to break it to you but that is EXACTLY what is going on here. Some people have EXPONENTIALLY more impact on saving a business than everyone else in the building. Real world examples:

- Two sales people who knew every high profit customer in our local market, which was the core of our turnaround plan

- My product engineer, with "the specs in her head". We could have never rebooted the business without her.

- The last manufacturing engineer standing, who we needed in the event we could secure a new facility for operations.

- My boss, the master deal maker who knew every major retail chain on our side of the country. Our secret to rebuilding the critical mass required for survival.

- One commercial manager (there were two of us), who was tasked with re-balancing the entire business on the fly to deal with massive swings in costs and competitor activity. Our pre-fire business model was completely shot and the banks cut us off, so we needed to reorganize around the new reality and find a way to generate positive cash flow to survive.

Without those five people / groups, the game was over - there would be no recovery plan, no road back to sustainable operations. Everyone else is irrelevant, potential cost savings when we needed them. You are playing a very high stakes short term game for the humble prize of survival...

Finance's job was basically to keep the tie fighters off our back, keep the lawyers, bankers, and insurance people away from folks doing the actual work. Customer Service was there to gently wind down relationships with non-critical accounts, in the vague hopes we could come back someday. We were able to give a few people some runway on those teams, moving anyone who wasn't able to hit the street immediately onto those lists to give them a little more time.

And your key people are irreplaceable in that world. There's no way someone of equivalent expertise is walking into that mess for what you're able to pay them.

At an individual level? We had to invoke our worst endgame due to other issues (deal fell apart); four of the critical five are no longer with the company. Each of them landed with a promotion and a fairly substantial raise elsewhere, often with instructions to "go take their business back". (at that point, it was open season for those accounts; our prior employer was unable to service them) The typical job search for that level of talent is hours / days rather than weeks or months (there is a very specific set of people who will hire them immediately if given the chance) .

Any visions of nobility needs to balanced against your obligations to support your spouse and children. You're going to sacrifice your kids future for some random people they never met? Your spouse is cool with that? Get real. (Mine knew what was going to happen; I had "the talk" with her beforehand. We knew my job was going to be eliminated and I couldn't break ranks without screwing my people. But we've both done turnaround work before, so we had a plan to handle it. She's one in a million.)

So that's the shit-show you're trying to hold together.

Heck, I had a financial model sitting on my laptop to go buy one of my dying brands from the company, once it was very apparent that they weren't able to protect it. At that point, it was basically sitting by the side of the road waiting for someone to claim it...