The word passion is thrown around in business so much that to rescue the concept, one needs to examine the sort of life led by Carla Cohen, founder of the famous Washington, D.C., bookstore Politics and Prose.
Forget market studies and exit strategies. No passionless or entirely sane person would have launched a bookstore in a quiet D.C. neighborhood 26 years ago. Discounter Crown Books was already mowing down little booksellers, an assault soon intensified by Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. Thousands of stores closed.
Cohen, wife of the liberal lobbyist David Cohen, and herself a Jimmy Carter appointee at Housing and Urban Development, more than anything loved to read. Good literature. Biography. Politics. Jobless after Ronald Reagan swept Carter's people out, she stewed on how to turn the intellectual salon she and her husband presided over at their home into a living.
And that's why Politics and Prose, which today has annual sales of more than $7 million, is more than a bookstore, and also why it prospered where others failed. Salon, indeed. The store hosts some 500 author appearances a year.
"Last month it was [New Yorker editor and Obama biographer David] Remnick, [novelist Jonathan] Franzen, and Condi Rice," says Cohen's son, Aaron, a New York Internet entrepreneur. "This is a woman -- I'm not sure she understood that revenue minus costs equals profits. But she was such a keen merchandiser of books and expert at bringing people together."