If you work as an independent professional or employee whereby you get paid by the hour, then your income depends heavily on your hourly rate. So obviously if you can raise your hourly rate, you can earn more money without working longer hours.

But when does it make sense to raise your hourly rate? How do you know if you’re charging a fair price for the service you provide?

When Not to Raise Your Rates

If you’re going to raise your rates, there should be solid business reasons for doing so. In the absence of such reasons, it makes no sense to raise your rates.

Because you feel like it is not a solid business reason.

Nor is the desire to earn more money. That’s a nice intention, but it’s not a justification for charging your clients more for the same service.

When to Raise Your Rates

Here are some cases where raising your rates may be a wise choice:

In The Three Stooges Moe tells Curly to get a job, and Curly backs away, saying, “No, please… not that! Anything but that!”

It’s funny that when people reach a certain age, such as after graduating college, they assume it’s time to go out and get a job. But like many things the masses do, just because everyone does it doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. In fact, if you’re reasonably intelligent, getting a job is one of the worst things you can do to support yourself. There are far better ways to make a living than selling yourself into indentured servitude.

Here are some reasons you should do everything in your power to avoid getting a job:

1. Income for dummies.

Getting a job and trading your time for money may seem like a good idea. There’s only one problem with it. It’s stupid! It’s the stupidest way you can possibly generate income! This is truly income for dummies.

Starting in the 1990s several different types of journals could be found on the Internet. But not till we reached the very end of the 1900s was the word blog introduced into our life. It was first used in 1999 on peterme.com — in a joking manner he broke up the word weblog into “we blog”. Now 10 years latter we have over 100 million blogs.

In this interesting video with Seth Godin and Tom Peters they discuss the benefits of blogging. How it has become a micro publishing platform. How it forces us to become part the discussion that is out there. “It’s the best marketing tool that he has ever had… and it’s free.” said Tom Peters

Some universities are beginning to choose sustainable education over rankings.

by David Wheeler from green@work magazine ’07

Two years ago, I sat in an audience of 200 business students watching a special screening of “The Corporation”—a depressing and somewhat disempowering documentary based on a book written by Canadian law professor Joel Bakan called Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power.

After a desultory panel discussion, one of the students stood up and asked why—in his entire time at business school—he had never heard the issues discussed in the movie raised in the classroom. He wanted to know if his school might learn from other institutions how to incorporate social and environmental content into the business curricula.

After spending the previous five years trying to do exactly that as a teacher in the same business school attended by the student, I was a little disappointed by the question. This school regularly ranked in the top few schools globally on its inclusion of sustainability and corporate social responsibility in the MBA program.

Calif. Budget Crisis Will Impact State’s Ability to Recover from Recession

In its second quarterly report of 2009, the UCLA Anderson Forecast upgrades the condition of the national economy, moving it out of “intensive care” while noting that it is still “very sick.”

The Forecast sees the gross domestic product improving from negative growth in the second quarter of this year to nearly perceptible growth in the final quarter while acknowledging that this tepid growth will be accompanied by an unemployment rate that will continue to rise well into 2010 and into double digits.

A study at the Stanford Graduate School of Business questions the value of an MBA and has raised debate and the ire of faculty on business school campuses throughout the United States.

The findings of professor Jeffrey Pfeffer and Ph.D. candidate Christina Fong challenge the traditional notion that the financial and time investment required of a Master of Business Administration degree is recovered through a resulting increase in starting salary upon graduation. After combing through 40 years’ worth of data, they found no conclusive evidence that an MBA pays off.

Dominican University of California acquired the Green MBA program and trademark offered at New College of California. The Green MBA was the region’s first graduate business program focused on corporate social responsibility, environmental sustainability, and social justice within the business context. The move to Dominican allows the MBA program to grow and reach a more mainstream student body.

The Green MBA co-founder and Executive Director John Stayton will move with the program to Dominican. The move is a homecoming of sorts for Stayton, who earned an MBA in International Business from Dominican in 1995. Stayton will retain his title as Green MBA program director. Stayton launched the program at New College as an MA program in 2000 and as an MBA in 2002.

The Green MBA provides a cohesive third offering to Dominican’s existing graduate business programs at a time when demand is growing for a workforce with an expertise in sustainability, said Dr. Christopher Leeds, Director of Dominican’s Graduate Business Programs. Dominican also offers an MBA in Strategic Leadership and an MBA in Global Strategic Management in its School of Business and Leadership.