Miriam Mutebi, Consultant Breast Surgical Oncologist, Immediate Past President of AORTIC- Africa, and UICC Board Member, shared on LinkedIn:
“Day 3 at WCC2026 was my favourite day of the whole congress.
And I did not expect that to be because of Optimus Prime. I’ll come back to that.
As Conference Chair, I had the honour of moderating the leadership plenary.
I’d been thinking about how to open it, what leadership actually means, stripped of the titles and the proximity to power. And I kept coming back to something I learned as a child.
‘You do not lead alone’.
Growing up, Optimus Prime, one of the main characters in the popular cartoon Transformers (later adapted into an animated movie), was one of my earliest teachers on leadership.
Optimus understood that very different individuals, with very different abilities, could move together toward a common mission.
He protected those with less power, naturally inspired loyalty and had clarity of purpose.
I put him on a WCC plenary stage. The room didn’t see it coming. But beneath the joke was something I meant completely:
You can occupy every seat at every table and still lead nothing. The measure isn’t recognition but trust.
It’s whether people will move with you. Whether your influence opens a door for someone who couldn’t open it alone.
The feedback was warm. Then our hosts, the Hong Kong Anti-Cancer Society (HKACS), gave us something I will not forget.
They took us to the Tai Hung district for the Mid-Autumn Fire Dragon Festival.
A 67-metre dragon, covered in 12,000 burning incense sticks; carried through narrow streets by hundreds of dancers.
This is a tradition running unbroken since 1880. The ‘dragon’ is made of rattan, straw and rope. Watching it glide toward us on the shoulders of men, I kept thinking: this is#cancercontrol.
Not the dragon, the discipline.
(I’ll share pictures in a future post).
The understanding that no single person carries the whole weight, but everything collapses if anyone stops showing up.
Everyone, moving together. That there IS the work.”
Other articles about WCC2026 on OncoDaily.
