I appreciate what you are saying but the reality is, at least from my personal experience through a number of crises, is that once the stock is significantly da

I appreciate what you are saying but the reality is, at least from my personal experience through a number of crises, is that once the stock is significantly damaged, stock-compensation-heavy companies should just expect to lose their top tier talent. I have seen it happen over and over. It is better just to accept that it will occur. I have never, ever seen experienced management be able to recover the situation. What really happens, though, is: if your company was not already running lean, and had a good amount of redundancy, you will lose some of your top tier talent but not all of it, due to reasons such as inertia, sunk-cost-fallacy thinking, true belief, family circumstances beyond your knowledge, and so on. One of the lessons that crises teaches is that slack in the system and redundancy is actually good. The experienced managers then credit themselves instead of these factors. One interesting takeaway is that lean startups, that can't lose more than one or two of their senior engineers, die in these situations.