If you want to know how someone is likely to react to a perceived slight, sneak a peek at his or her right hand.

By Anne Fisher, contributor

Let's say you recently turned someone down for a raise or a promotion, and he has now retaliated -- for instance, by quitting in a huff and taking a valuable client list with him.

According to a new study of the role of testosterone in business negotiations, you might have foreseen that, and maybe even prevented it, if you had checked out his right hand before making (or refusing) an offer. Specifically, if someone's ring finger and his index finger are the same length, look out.

Little or no difference in the size of those digits is an indicator of high prenatal testosterone, which tells you two things. First, this is a person who is preoccupied with preserving his status and saving face. Unless you handle his ego with kid gloves, he will be quick to take offense.

And second, if you cross him, he will get even.

That's the conclusion of an intriguing study called "Lex talionis: Testosterone and the law of retaliation," to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. More

Federal agencies are imposing hiring freezes, eliminating openings, and preparing for severe budget cuts, dashing the hopes and prospects of many upcoming graduates and other jobseekers.

By Elizabeth G. Olson, contributor

Only months ago, getting a job as a federal government worker was a reasonably safe bet. Private sector hiring was sputtering. Baby boomers at federal agencies were retiring in droves, replaced by newly recruited college graduates.

But before the class of 2011 could don their graduation caps, the federal job market has turned dramatically weaker. Agencies are imposing hiring freezes on new employees or filling vacant positions, as they wait under the raised hammer of a government shutdown at worst and severe budget cutbacks at best.

The resulting federal job shrinkage is due to huge budget deficits, which were already ballooning years earlier, with income tax breaks and two wars depleting federal coffers. The 2008 Wall Street meltdown pushed everything over the edge, and federal programs and personnel are now prime targets as deficit hawks complain the government is bloated and that employees work too little and are paid too much.

Dashed hopes for upcoming grads

The latest jobs forecast for 2011 college graduates found that the government is expected to fill 10% fewer posts than it did last year. The 2011 jobs outlook, by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, found that more than one-third of government employers plan to cut plans to hire new college grads -- the largest group of the industries surveyed. And government employers planning decreases are reducing their staff numbers by at least 25%. More

The entrepreneur has a plan for land  preservation that  actually makes money. Now he just has to prove it.

By Brian Dumaine, senior editor at large

Patagonia Sur members explore the Los Leones glacier.

You can't reach Melimoyu, a fishing village of 50 nestled on the rugged southern coast of Patagonia, by car. From Coyhaique, Chile, a twin-prop Piper Comanche carries me between jagged mountain peaks, through thick gray clouds, driving rain, and 50-mph winds toward a small private airstrip. As the plane banks sharply to land, the wind buffets the craft so severely that the instrument panel issues stomach-churning blips and beeps. As I cling to my seat, I take some solace in the fact that Hugo, our pilot, is wearing an olive green flight jacket with an insignia on the sleeve that looks like he was once an F-16 fighter pilot in the Chilean air force.

After a safe landing and a hearty pat on Hugo's back, I hop onto the tarmac thinking my journey is over. But no one -- and not a single building -- is in sight. Eventually a pickup truck appears and takes me to a makeshift metal dock. From there a 30-foot twin outboard carries me across a bay surrounded by rain forests, magnificent waterfalls, and glaciers -- think Avatar without the blue people. Heavy seas slam the hull as loudly as a Fourth of July cherry bomb. As we near our destination, I notice there's no dock. I jump off the boat onto a launch, which carries me to a beach where a tractor waits in water halfway up its wheels. The wooden platform attached to its rear acts as a dock. Welcome to Patagonia on a not atypical summer day. More

The day your best employee comes in with the news that they're moving on is the day you start recruiting them again. Here are a few things to keep in mind.

By Hank Gilman, deputy managing editor

While you might have a bigger paycheck and you might have a special feeling inside now that you have a staff of your own, the gripes, hiring, and firing responsibilities are also all yours. Welcome to management. In You Can't Fire Everyone, Fortune deputy managing editor Hank Gilman lays out some of the most critical challenges managers face today, drawing from his decades of experience on the front lines.

The following excerpt addresses the unfortunate, inevitable day when your talented employees decide to leave. This excerpt also marks the official launch of You Can't Fire Everyone (sound familiar?), a series that will open our site to reader contributions on their triumphs and trials in the working world. Tune in next week for tales on firing and being fired.

I know this will come as a shocker -- well, to some of you -- but eventually new and/or better jobs will come along for your more talented people. Or eventually they'll just get tired of what they're doing (and of you) and will want to experience something else. Or sometimes a job offer will come along and your star won't know whether they want to leave or not. But if and when a star decides to leave, you just have to understand and hope that someday they'll return. And you know what? It does happen. And a lot of it depends on how you act when they leave.

Now, some bosses will hold grudges. Pretty much like a scorned husband or wife. There's one story of a publisher I'll leave unnamed, that will not hire you back if you leave. It's a breakup pure and simple. (My boss kind of feels that way. Jeez, you should see his face when someone leaves. But he always lets them return!) But I like to look at it a different way. The day your best employee comes in with the news that they're moving on is the day you start recruiting them again. A few things to keep in mind: More

Think about it: Rare is the company that manages to live long into its golden years. Here's how a company can improve their odds of survival.

The Shell Mex House, Shell's former headquarters in London. Photo taken in 1955.

By Christian Stadler, contributor

(ManagementInnovationeXchange) -- Some companies have the knack of turning in stellar performance decade after decade.  To be sure, they may lose their way for a year or two, but somehow they overcome the setback and resume their relentless progress. General Electric is one such company. So is Shell. Understanding what sets these companies apart from their rivals is arguably the holy grail of managers and business scholars alike.

For the last six years, I have led a team of eight researchers in a study of some of Europe's oldest and best companies.  We asked:  What distinguishes companies that managed to perform at a very high level over very long periods from others that do not perform as well? To answer this question we selected a sample of companies that had turned in an extraordinarily high performance over the past 50 years (our gold medalists outperformed the stock exchange by at least the factor of 15) and compared each with another old company, whose performance was still good but which was well behind the very high performer (we call them silver medalists). Fifteen years after Collins and Porras' Built to Last, our work incorporates fresh insights from management science and provides the first non-U.S. perspective on long-range success.

Reading through corporate histories, collecting material in archives, and interviewing 34 CEOs, chairmen, and board members, a counterintuitive story emerged: the greatest companies do not excel through radical innovation or daring transformations, but adapt to a constantly changing environment by being intelligently conservative. They religiously apply what we call the "five principles of enduring success." While there's no guarantee that the companies we studied will never fall on hard times, we believe there is much to learn from their history. More

The Wisconsin governor may have never expected such support of collective bargaining when he proposed removing it for public employees. Jim Schmitz, director of organizing for AFSCME, discusses what this means for the future of labor.

By David Whitford, editor-at-large

Collective protesting in Wisconsin

Until recently, a lot of people in America probably thought that labor unions were basically extinct. Then last month, Wisconsin's Republican Governor Scott Walker introduced legislation in his state that would drastically curtail the power of public employee unions by eliminating their ability to collectively bargain. Teachers, firemen, and other public employees -- along with their supporters -- took to the streets and the Democratic opposition in the state senate decamped to Illinois to prevent a quorum. Suddenly, unexpectedly, people are not only talking about unions again, but most of them are saying nice things.

Jim Schmitz is director of organizing for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) union, the big public-sector union at the heart of the crisis in Wisconsin. Although the Democrats are now heading back to Madison for the vote, the labor debate is far from over. Fortune caught up with Schmitz last week for his thoughts on the future of the labor movement and how it's been buoyed by Walker's proposal. More

This Kentucky railroad baron isn't a household name. But his story is one of extraordinary success, generosity, grit, and sadness.

By Carol Loomis, senior editor-at-large

Founder and owner Rick Corman on a diesel locomotive in his Lexington rail yard.

Richard Jay Corman is hardly a household name. But this entrepreneur, a son of Kentucky, has made himself a force in the railroad industry, where in up-from-nothing fashion he has created a thriving, highly respected company. Called R.J. Corman Railroad Group, it's a construction and operating enterprise that takes in around $300 million a year. Rick Corman, 55, is its sole owner. Earnings? He will say only that it's "incredibly profitable." But we'll make an informed estimate: This business, after taxes, has in more than one recent year earned $50 million in profits.

A Kentucky friend of mine, impressed by Corman and aware also that he was facing some complex estate-planning problems, suggested he'd make a good story. You couldn't say the idea was a natural for us: Corman's financial feats, while first-class, don't exactly put him in the Fortune 500 league. Still, Corman seemed worth a trip, so last fall I went to see him in his home state. And well before we finished talking, I realized that he just might be -- apologies here to the Reader's Digest, which popularized this title -- the Most Unforgettable Character I've Ever Met in my more than a half-century at Fortune. That may seem surprising given that I've come to know more than a few standout CEOs over the years. But the emphasis here is on the word "character." In the way he operates -- and faces the world -- Rick Corman is truly larger than life.

And that's not just in business. Corman has also led a kind of soap opera existence, whose chapters he began describing to me in his twangy Southern drawl, and with a startling lack of inhibition, within minutes of our starting to talk. We were at his headquarters in the Lexington, Ky., suburb of Nicholasville, in a small conference room adjoining a cafeteria. He made sure I sat where I could look through a glass wall down to a hangar in which there were parked two private jets and a helicopter, all of them bright red (more on that later). At that moment, I was too obtuse to grasp how unusual those aircraft were. I mean, really, how many red planes have you seen? More

As Duke Energy takes heat over private meetings it had with its regulator, corporate boards should expect tough questions from shareholders on political activities this proxy season.

Duke Energy CEO James Rogers

By Eleanor Bloxham, contributor

Political activity and agitation are in the spotlight on multiple fronts across the globe, and despite advance warnings from investors, the issue remains off the radar for U.S. corporate boards.

Last week, for the first time in four years, TIAA-CREF, a financial services organization with over $450 billion in assets under management, updated its policy statement on corporate governance. The statement includes a section on political influence in which TIAA-CREF argues that political spending may pose "risks to shareholders, including the risk that corporate political spending may benefit political insiders at the expense [of] shareholder interests."

This statement is reflective of  growing concern by many investors in the wake of the Citizen's United Supreme Court decision, in which the Court ruled that the government cannot prohibit companies from spending on political elections. More

The average worker seems to be sleepwalking their way through their jobs, according to the latest employee engagement surveys. Here are three mostly free tactics to give your team a boost.

By Daniel Debow, contributor

While the U.S. economy recovers, the average worker seems to have lost a sense of meaning at work. They're disengaged -- and that disengagement is costing companies big money. According to a 2010 employee engagement study by Gallup, "disengaged employees erode an organization's bottom line, while breaking the spirits of colleagues in the process. Within the U.S. workforce, Gallup estimates this cost to the bottom line to be more than $300 billion in lost productivity alone." Ouch.

More importantly, that's a lot of people who are sleepwalking through the activity that takes up the majority of their lives: their job. And it's quite clear that throwing money at employees is not the answer. As Daniel Pink explains in Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, it's "not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine-to-five. It's whether our work fulfills us."

I run a tech startup. Startups are known for their employee engagement practices. We have to be good at it. They might seem glamorous in movies like The Social Network, where Mark Zuckerberg goes from Harvard dorm to executive boardroom in 90 minutes of screen time. Working at a tech startup translates to years of long hours, below-market salaries, and the nagging fear that all of your friends are on the Facebook rocket while you've picked the MySpace horse and buggy. More

Social media sites are handy for learning more about applicants than their resumes reveal, but beware the legal pitfalls.

By Anne Fisher, contributor

Dear Annie: I read your recent post on using social media sites to find a job, and I wonder if you can answer a question from the hiring side. I'm staffing up a new brand-management team at my company. The HR department is doing most of the initial screening, but I've also been Googling candidates and looking them up on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn just to get a clearer sense of what they're like before they come in for interviews.

My boss saw me doing this and suggested I speak with someone in our legal department about it. He didn't say why, and I didn't ask, but now I'm curious. Do I really have to get legal involved? As a rule I'd rather not, but what will I be missing if I don't? —Wondering in Washington, D.C.

Dear Wondering: Your boss has a point. Although 77% of hiring managers now use social media sites to check out job candidates, according to a recent poll by executive career site ExecuNet, the practice comes with a few legal risks that you'd be smart to keep in mind. More