With each passing day that the stock market gyrates wildly on some new bit of negative economic news, it becomes increasingly clear that we’re going to be dealing with an extremely tough business environment for some time to come.

This isn’t a media-created crisis as some shallow thinkers would have you believe, but the product of a lot of suspect decisions made for a number of years that are now showing their true impact on the global economy. And for everyone who manages talent and worries about the impact on people, it means we are in for a long, bumpy ride.

“This is an equal-opportunity recession,” says Cathy Paige, a vice president at temporary staffing firm Manpower, which has seen softening demand from clients. “Everyone is feeling it.” Paige was quoted in a recent BusinessWeek story headlined “The Coming Pink Slip Epidemic.” 

It’s a sobering read.

“As nervous lenders cower and credit contracts,” the story says, “virtually every industry is likely to be scathed in the widely predicted downturn starting this autumn. Nearly every business relies on credit to operate—just as they need customers to have spending power.” And, it continues with this prediction: “With lending trimmed, and companies and consumers tightening their belts, jobs will be cut across broad swaths of the economy, from the tech sector to investment banking, and from manufacturing to soft drinks.”

I’ve been managing people for a long time and have seen a number of economic ups and downs, but I can’t even recall as gloomy and difficult a period as we are now in. Managing talent and helping to keep your organization going through all of this will take skill and patience, but some experience and perspective would help too.

Here’s one way to get some of that needed perspective: from a breakfast seminar next week in New York titled “Managing Talent in a Turbulent Economy.” 

Workforce Management and Crain’s New York Business (one of our sister publications) will be hosting the breakfast event from 8-10:30 a.m. at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan.

We have a great keynote speaker—Kevin Ryan, the founder and former CEO of global Internet advertising company DoubleClick will talk about how you manage talent through the ups and downs of various economic cycles. In addition, I will be moderating a panel discussion with three executives who have also had to deal with managing people through difficult times:

• Renee Russell, the executive director for global talent management at Avon Products. She had to work through a period when Avon completely changed its business model and turned the company upside down.

• Ron Thomas, the former vice president of organization development at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. Ron had a challenge that very few managers have had to face: how to manage a workforce that is rattled when the company’s founder and guiding presence gets sent off to jail.

• Janet Hanson, founder of 85 Broads, a global network community of 18,000 women  who want to leverage one another’s connections, relationships and intellectual capital to increase the ROI on their education and their careers. As a former managing director at Lehman Brothers, Janet has firsthand experience with Wall Street and can speak to the turmoil that is going on there today.

Believe it or not, this is an event that was planned long before the current impact of the economic downturn became clear. If you are in New York and want to hear from some seasoned executives who have dealt firsthand with managing through tough times and lived to tell about it, sign up now for this October 29 event. I know they will have some very insightful observations and strategies for helping to get through the downturn ahead.