Army Interrogator Turned Psychologist Exposes Why Your Team Has Stopped Talking in New Book 'The Missed Meeting'

A former interrogator's guide to the most misunderstood 30 minutes in business.

NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, March 24, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- U.S. businesses lose an estimated $1.2 trillion annually to poor communication, a figure that Industrial-Organizational Psychologist Pete Ketchum argues isn’t a communication problem, but a psychological one. In his new book, The Missed Meeting: What One Conversation Reveals About Everything Else, Ketchum demonstrates how the humble one-on-one meeting is actually a "check engine light" for organizational health and why most leaders are ignoring the signal.

Ketchum’s insights are forged from an unconventional path. Before advising executives, he trained as a military interrogator and state trooper, learning to build rapport in high-stakes environments. Yet, as he reveals in the book, his most significant challenge wasn't a hostile detainee, but a routine check-in with a cooperative employee named "Sarah."

"I led with that story because success is built on failures," says Ketchum. "I’d spent years having difficult conversations with people who actively didn’t want to talk to me. If a guy with my background could miss this badly with a willing employee, it gives every leader permission to admit they might be missing it too."

The Missed Meeting reveals that companies don’t need to incentivize their teams to do good work. They just need to stop demotivating them. Ketchum challenges the very systems leaders use to manage people, arguing that most organizations operate on a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature that no amount of perks can fix.

"Organizations run on a Mechanical OS: Compliance, Control, and Transactions," Ketchum explains. "Humans run on a different operating system entirely: Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness. The mismatch is where motivation goes to die."

The Missed Meeting is now available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other major retailers.

About the Author

Pete Ketchum is an industrial-organizational psychologist, founder of Ketchum Advisory, and author of The Missed Meeting. His understanding of human behavior was forged as an Army-trained interrogator, state corrections officer, and state trooper before he transitioned to build people systems at high-growth companies.

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