What If the Goal Isn’t the Right Decision — It’s the One You Can Live With?
Leadership runs on decisions. Big ones, small ones, the ones that keep you up at night, and the ones you make so fast you don’t even realize you’ve made them. And if you’ve been leading long enough, you know that the hardest part isn’t usually the decision itself — it’s the second-guessing that comes after. The quiet, persistent loop of what if I’d chosen differently.
Parul Somani has spent two decades helping leaders get out of that loop. And her just-published debut book is the framework she’s been building toward the whole time.
The Path of Least Regret: Decide with Clarity. Move Forward with Confidence is a research-grounded, deeply personal guide to one of the most underrated leadership skills there is: making hard decisions in conditions of uncertainty, and then actually letting yourself move forward.
Who Is Parul Somani?
Somani is a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School who began her career in management consulting at Bain & Company, where she rose to senior manager advising private equity firms, and later held leadership roles in Silicon Valley startups. By any conventional measure, she was exactly on track.
Then, at age thirty-one, shortly after the birth of her second child, she was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer. Rather than retreat from the experience, she documented it publicly through her blog New Job. New Baby. New Cancer. — which eventually reached readers in more than 85 countries and established her as a powerful voice on resilience, self-advocacy, and what it means to make life-altering decisions under pressure.
Drawing on both her professional expertise and personal resilience, she developed the Path of Least Regret® framework, which Fortune 100 companies and high-achievers worldwide now use to make intentional decisions in life and leadership. She has spoken at the White House for President Biden’s Cancer Moonshot Initiative, the World Economic Forum, and for leading organizations including Oracle, Bristol Myers Squibb, and Neiman Marcus Group.
She is, in every sense, someone who has earned the right to write this book.
So, What’s It Actually About?
Somani’s central argument is a quiet reframe with significant implications: the goal of good decision-making isn’t certainty — it’s peace of mind. Most of us approach hard decisions as if there’s a definitively correct answer we’re trying to locate, and we measure our success by how right we turn out to be. Somani proposes a different standard. The Path of Least Regret® is a practical, repeatable process that transforms regret from a backward-looking burden into a forward-looking compass for peace of mind.
The framework draws on psychology, neuroscience, and Somani’s own coaching work with executives and high-achievers navigating everything from career pivots to health crises to difficult organizational decisions. She introduces what she calls the Emotional Journey of Decision-Making™ — the phases we move through around any significant choice, and how understanding those phases changes our relationship to the discomfort that comes with them.
For leaders, the applications are immediate and wide-ranging. How do you make a call when the data is incomplete? How do you hold a team steady when you’re not sure what’s coming next? How do you know when to stay the course and when to pivot — and how do you own that decision, whatever it turns out to be? Somani doesn’t pretend these questions have easy answers. She gives you a way of approaching them that leads to less paralysis, less regret, and more of the clarity that good leadership requires.
What You’ll Take Away
- Clarity doesn’t require certainty — it requires intention. This is the book’s animating idea, and it lands differently the more leadership experience you bring to it. You don’t have to know how something will turn out to make a decision you can stand behind. Somani shows you how to get there.
- Regret is a compass, not a verdict. One of the framework’s most powerful moves is repositioning regret as a tool for navigating forward rather than evidence of a past failure. Leaders who understand this make better decisions — and recover from the hard ones faster.
- The emotional journey of a decision is predictable — and manageable. Somani maps the psychological arc that most people experience around major decisions, and names the stages with enough precision that you’ll start recognizing them in yourself and in the people you lead. That recognition alone is useful.
- Your values are the decision-making criteria you’ve probably been underusing. A recurring theme throughout the book is the gap between what we say we prioritize and what actually drives our choices. Somani gives you tools to close that gap — which makes decisions not only easier to make, but easier to live with.
- This framework works for the people you lead, not just for you. Perhaps most relevant for mid-career leaders: Somani’s approach translates directly to team dynamics. How you create conditions for others to make hard calls, take smart risks, and move through uncertainty without freezing — that’s leadership, and this book addresses it directly.
Why We’re Recommending It
There’s no shortage of books about decision-making. What sets The Path of Least Regret apart is the combination of intellectual rigor and lived wisdom that Somani brings to the subject — the MIT-and-Harvard-trained strategist who has also faced down her own mortality and made some of the hardest calls a person can make.
That combination makes this book trustworthy in a way that purely theoretical frameworks never quite manage. She’s not telling you how to decide from the outside. She’s telling you from the inside — and handing you something genuinely useful on the way out.
Get The Book
The Path of Least Regret: Decide with Clarity. Move Forward with Confidence. was just published by Forbes Books and is available now wherever books are sold, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, and Books-A-Million.
Learn more about Parul Somani and her work at parulsomani.com.
