Vietnamese-American David Duong has spun gold from American trash

I especially like the first line of this 27.8.10 Thanh Nien News article.  David Duong is the classic rags-to-riches story.  He saw an opportunity and took advantage of it.  His companies, California Waste Solutions and Vietnam Waste Solutions are excellent examples of “doing well and doing good.” 

His ambitious and doable plan to bring U.S. university campuses to Vietnam is what I described in a recent article (Vietnam: A Rising Star on the U.S. Higher Education Scene) as the “next frontier” – offering Vietnamese students and parents the more affordable option of pursuing quality U.S. higher education at home.  

What Mr. Duong said about “teaching people to fish” is one of my favorite expressions.  It is, of course, a saying from Lao Tzu, the Chinese Taoist philosopher:  “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”