OFF the CUFF
  • She’s big, she’s loud and she’s messy and Wendy Williams wouldn’t have it any other way.

    The host of The Wendy Williams Show which launched in 2009, has a larger than life personality with great timing. After Oprah Winfrey announced that after 25 years on the air, she was going to end her daily show, many are now convinced Williams is the new queen of daytime TV.

    Williams, who spent 23 years as a radio D.J. was one of the nation’s top shock jocks who gained fame and millions of followers with her in-your-face questions and on-air spats with celebrities. The one that gained notoriety attention (good and bad) was her 2003 on-air explosive argument with Whitney Houston over the singer’s rumored drug use. It was a riveting and sadly prophetic interview.
    Nine years later Houston died of accidental drowning, but the toxicology report showed cocaine and other substances were found in her system. The news hit Williams hard, she broke down crying on her national TV show and made an emotional

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  • Dwight Gooden: Cheating Death and Learning to Live Again

    Dwight Gooden admits he should be dead, but he says he’s not, because he’s here for a purpose.

    At 19 years old, the youngest starting pitcher in Major League Baseball’s history, he went on to win three World Series rings, was named Rookie of the year and received the Cy Young Award. He was one of the most feared pitchers in all of baseball. But he was most afraid of himself.

    “I snorted some cocaine, and it was love at first sniff,” he writes in his new book, "Doc: A Memoir." It was a long love affair that started in 1985 costing him his career, his family, his fortune, his name and almost his life.

    In 1986 the night the Mets won the World Series, he says he was so coked out on drugs and booze that he missed the team’s ticker tape parade where thousands of cheering fans filled the streets in a wild celebration as the team went down the “Canyon of Heroes,” a stretch of Lower Manhattan where America’s greatest of the greats are celebrated.

    In his memoir he remembers, “I was alone in my

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  • How to Get Anything You Want Without Spending a Penny

    Adam Werbach has a knack for controversy - and for making history.

    In 1996, at 23, he was elected the youngest president of the Sierra Club, the environmental organization, which boasted 600,000 members and a budget of $45 million.
    “I wasn't even old enough to rent a car, and all of a sudden I was supposed to lead the oldest and largest grassroots environmental organization,” Werbach told “Off the Cuff”, “I remember my first reaction was just, oh my god, I don't know if I can do this, I was just scared.”

    Then in 2004 he gave an incendiary speech, “Is Environmentalism Dead?”, at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. "I'm done calling myself an environmentalist", he told his audience.
    “It was frightening, because it was giving a eulogy for the thing that I loved the most, that I had spent my whole life doing, to the very people who were also invested in it,” Werbach recalled.
    Werbach felt the time was right for the organization to ask tough questions, to look deep within itself to see if their mission was on the right track. “I felt was that we were failing, that after spending years and millions, even billions of dollars trying to get the word out about climate change, people weren't changing. We weren't making a difference.”

    The controversial speech was widely circulated and the backlash was immediate. The environmental wunderkind lost colleagues and long-time friends.

    A year later, he further alienated the environmental community when he teamed up with Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, a company he had called, “a new breed of toxin” that could “wreak havoc on a town” in his 1997 book, “Act Now, Apologize Later.”

    “My responsibility was to train the 2 million people who work at Wal-Mart on what sustainability is, and how it can be a tool for change, not just for the earth, but to run a better business.”
    He was eviscerated by some environmentalists who said he had “sold his soul” and was accused of abandoning his principles.

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  • Jim McCann: From Bartender to 30 Million Clients

    Nothing says it like flowers.

    “We got a visit from the FBI one time,” Jim McCann, the founder and CEO of 1-800-Flowers.com, told “Off the Cuff.” “We’d sent a funeral piece to someone who wasn't yet dead—with a special message on the card. We learned that, some things, you should turn down.“

    They can afford to. With 30 million customers worldwide, the online florist and gift empire brought in more than $716 million in revenue in 2012.

    In 1976, McCann was the night counselor at a group home for young men in New York. He did odd jobs to supplement the low pay. “Being an Irish Catholic kid from South Queens, it's a genetic requirement that I work in a bar,” he said. One day, a man came into the bar (true story). He told McCann that he was selling the flower shop he owned. McCann bought it.

    “I went into it with the idea that it was a fun business, in the sense that you work with people around nice occasions. It was inexpensive to get into,” he recalled.
    “Nobody had McDonald-ized the flower business. Nobody had grown a big company. I thought, ‘Well, maybe there's a chance.’”

    He bought more flower shops and in 1986 changed the company’s name to the distinctive “1-800-Flowers.” It was one of the first ventures to sell flowers over the phone and to adopt a mnemonic device as its name.

    “A friend of mine told me many years ago that the best business ideas you've ever seen, the first time you heard about them, you almost laughed,” McCann said. “Everyone told us it was a ridiculous idea. So that scared us. But it also gave us the push to go on.”

    The company took off. “Sounds laughable now, an 800 number,” McCann said. “(But) we'd now disrupted and changed an industry by embracing a new technology.”
    His brother, Chris McCann, who’s now the president of the company, encouraged him to stay ahead of the curve. “We always had our antenna up, looking for what was the next technology that was going to come along.”

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Pagination

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