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Cover of The Missed Meeting

The Missed Meeting

What One Conversation Reveals About Everything Else

What if the most expensive problem in your organization is not the one you are trying to solve, but the one you are accidentally creating? Every year, businesses spend billions on engagement initiatives, wellness programs, and motivational speakers. Meanwhile, they systematically destroy the motivation their employees arrived with on day one. The problem is not that people need to be motivated. It is that organizations have become remarkably efficient at demotivating them. The Missed Meeting exposes a costly blind spot hiding in plain sight: the gap between how organizations operate and how humans actually function. Companies optimize for compliance, control, and measurement. Humans thrive on autonomy, competence, and connection. This mismatch does not just hurt morale. It bleeds money, talent, and competitive advantage. The one-on-one meeting is where this dysfunction becomes undeniable. That awkward silence across the conference table is not a scheduling problem or a training gap. It is a diagnostic signal, a check engine light revealing friction that runs through your entire culture. Most leaders put tape over the dashboard, to hide the awkward problem. This book teaches you to look under the hood. Pete Ketchum is an industrial-organizational psychologist who learned to build trust under pressure long before entering business. Military interrogation, prison de-escalation, and volatile roadside interviews as a state trooper all demanded the same skills: establishing rapport quickly, maintaining structure, and following through on commitments. He later held leadership positions across finance, construction, and technology, where he discovered that these principles are precisely the ones most corporate best practices ignore. This is not another book about being nicer to employees. It is a book about removing the hidden barriers that make smart people feel stupid, capable people feel powerless, and connected people feel alone. The frameworks are practical and immediate. The implications reach far beyond any single meeting. The organizations that understand this first will have an unfair advantage over those still wondering why their people seem so disengaged.

Genres

BusinessPsychology

ISBN

9798902436232

Format

Print / Paperback

Contributor

Pete Ketchum

Author

Pete Ketchum is an industrial-organizational psychologist who learned how humans actually work long before he studied the theory. As a U.S. Army Human Intelligence NCO, he trained in behavioral assessment and structured interviewing, learning to build rapport and read resistance in environments where getting it wrong had real consequences. As a state trooper, he handled volatile encounters where establishing trust quickly was not optional. These were not stepping stones to a career. They were formative years spent understanding what motivates people, what shuts them down, and what it takes to earn trust under pressure. He later earned a master's degree in Industrial-Organizational Psychology and directed research with more than 8,500 participants. But data is only one lens. Ketchum approaches organizational problems the way he learned to approach human problems: by understanding the behaviors, the perspectives, and the hidden friction that standard frameworks miss. The result is solutions that fit the specific organization rather than generic best practices borrowed from someone else's playbook. Military service, law enforcement, finance, construction, technology. Each industry taught him something different about how organizations scale, where they break, and why the instincts that built a company rarely survive its growth. That unusual breadth produced a perspective most specialists never develop: the ability to see patterns across domains that appear unrelated until someone connects them. His work centers on one question: what made this organization valuable in the first place, and how do we systematize that so it scales without being destroyed? Most companies accidentally dismantle the very things that made them special. Ketchum helps leaders see where that is happening and design systems that grow with the business instead of against it. He writes and advises on the gap between how organizations operate and how humans actually function.

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