中文Most industry events are pageants. Someone cuts a ribbon, a keynote predicts the future, everyone nods, everyone forgets. FESPA’s Leadership Exchange (FLEX) is the opposite of that, and that is exactly why the people who run serious print businesses want in.
On 26 November 2026, FLEX returns to Dubai — an invitation-only day at the JW Marriott Marquis for senior print executives from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. The theme is “The Choices That Build Stronger Print Businesses.” Notice the word “choices,” not “secrets.” The organisers are promising candid debate, not victory laps.
Why a room of bosses, off the record
Running a print company has never been simple, but the last few years have been a masterclass in whiplash — pandemics, supply-chain shocks, energy spikes, shifting customer habits. The leaders who made it through did not do so by reading more brochures. They did it by making ugly calls under pressure and living with the consequences.
FLEX is built to surface those calls. The morning sessions are explicitly framed around trade-offs, hard-learned lessons, and strategic pivots — not highlight reels.
Take Simon Pless of the Kleinhempel Group, who will walk through “30 Years of Disruption,” including the decisions that delivered less than expected. That last part is rare. Most conferences only share wins. FLEX is betting that the failures teach more.
Leon van der Meer from Probo.nl will talk about scaling without losing customer focus — steering through COVID, geopolitical supply-chain pressure, and shifting demand while keeping a team’s confidence intact. Paul Spiers, of The New P&L, closes the morning on leadership under pressure: how to build clarity and trust when the ground will not stop moving.
Then the three sit for a panel literally titled “What We Would Do Differently.” If you have ever wanted to hear successful printers admit their mistakes in public, this is the session.
The Middle East gets the microphone too
The afternoon turns to regional dynamics, and this is where Dubai earns its place on the agenda. Vatche Kavlakian, CEO of NDIGITEC, will explore how local print houses can leverage global networks to become credible partners for international brands. There is a collaborative PESTEL analysis — political, economic, social, technological, environmental, legal — breaking down what is actually shaping investment across the region.
Prasanna Naidu of Veesham Printing Press will share how local market knowledge, service diversification, and customer loyalty helped his business navigate volatility and last for the long haul. That is the quiet core of resilience: not one heroic pivot, but a thousand small, loyal, pragmatic choices.
What you can steal from it
You do not need an invitation to take the lesson. FLEX’s whole premise is that resilient print businesses are built by design, not luck.
One: invest in automation before you think you need it, so the next disruption hurts less. Two: protect customer focus even while you cut costs — the clients who feel cared for are the ones who stay. Three: build genuine partnerships and networks; when a market closes, another opens through someone you know. Four: be honest about what did not work. A culture that punishes mistakes hides the very information you need to survive.
The day wraps with “The Next Move” and an open forum — an unvarnished space to challenge assumptions and argue about commercial pressures. Then a networking reception, because the real value of these gatherings has always been the conversation in the corridor, not the slide on the screen.
FLEX is small, selective, and deliberately unglamorous. That is the point. In a noisy industry, the most useful room is often the quiet one where the people who actually sign the cheques tell each other the truth — and quietly decide what they will do differently on Monday.
For the converters in the room, the value is not in any single insight but in the permission to be honest. Most print bosses are trained to project confidence and hide doubt. FLEX inverts that: the people who admit what went wrong are the ones others learn from. That culture — candour as competitive advantage — is rare and worth the airfare alone.
And the MENA focus matters. The Gulf is pouring money into tourism, logistics, and manufacturing, all of which need print and signage. Printers there who learn to plug into global brand networks, as NDIGITEC’s Kavlakian argues, can punch far above their local weight. Dubai, with its hub geography, is the natural place to broker that connection between regional skill and international opportunity.
There is a reason FESPA keeps investing in this format rather than another tradeshow floor. The industry is starved of honest peer conversation. Most events optimise for booths and badges; FLEX optimises for the dinner-table talk about the mistake that almost sank you. That knowledge does not fit in a brochure, and it is exactly what separates the printers who endure from the ones who merely survive a good quarter.
Source: FESPA (15 October 2026)
