In 1973, a woman walked into a Harvard Square café and sat down at the next table. He reached for her jacket without asking. She stopped him cold.
He was a German student at Harvard Business School, trained to find the pattern beneath any problem. She was an American psychologist who saw through people before they finished their first sentence. He had never been seen so clearly. She had never met someone so determined to know himself - and so far from managing it.

Falling with Purpose moves between their courtship and the world that formed him: postwar Germany, coal dust and factory floors, soccer and jazz, first love, family silence, and the early days of the Boston Consulting Group. It is the story of a man who mastered strategy, built a career, and nearly lost the one thing that made any of it matter.

At its center is a single German word: Durchblick - the ability to see through confusion to what truly matters. Michael Norkus spent decades applying that clarity to markets, companies, and business problems. It took considerably longer to understand that the same clarity, turned inward, leads somewhere simpler - and that love is not a feeling but a choice, made again and again, at real cost.
Part memoir, part love story, part portrait of postwar Germany and the birth of modern business strategy, Falling with Purpose is for readers of Wallace Stegner, Sebastian Junger, and Phil Knight's Shoe Dog - and for anyone who has ever been very good at the wrong things.

The why is love. Not as something solved. As something chosen.