Prior to the event, I felt its ‘Print United’ moniker was perhaps a little unsuitable – and that maybe the organisers might have better compared the sector to warring factions on the terraces than exponents of a beautiful ‘game’ all playing for the same team. But I was wrong.

The conference itself was great, with some fantastic speakers. But that was just a tiny part of the two-day event’s appeal. It was the discussions going on in-between and after the sessions that changed my mind.

Don’t get me wrong, I love PowerPoint presentations as much as the next man, but seeing hundreds of printers networking in little huddles was truly awe-inspiring. Why should that be, though? Surely printers talking to printers in an open forum for their mutual benefit should be the rule, rather than the exception.

As highlighted in our briefing on peer-to-peer learning (p8), it seems that the biggest stumbling block to knowledge sharing is the age-old fear of inadvertently gifting some sensitive information or – worse still – a client to a competitor.

But ask yourself this: hand on heart, do you know what your key competitors are up to and who their best clients are? I’m willing to bet that you do.

The truth is that there are precious few ‘secrets’ in our industry. In fact, it’s probably a safe to say that the six degrees of separation between any two people in the world are probably just two in print.

So why not try getting that down to one degree. What’s the worst that can happen?