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I’ve been reading a lot about how social movements start, stall, or succeed. Apparently, it’s an inexact art, making success a challenge to duplicate. An effort that caught my eye recently, though, made television history last month.

Many of you may have seen or even participated in the September 5 Stand Up to Cancer (SU2C; www.standup2cancer.org) telethon on all three television networks, XM radio, and elsewhere. While the cause is certainly laudable, and the amount raised ($100 MILLION) in the mere three months since the organization’s launch in June 2008 and its telethon is breathtaking, I was especially interested in how this young organization planned to tackle a massive social problem on which hundreds of nonprofits already focus. And how would it convince people that what its leaders had in mind differentiated them dramatically from all other cancer-focused nonprofits?

First, SU2C is a radical bid to suppress barriers among multiple health, science, and technology sectors and build an entirely new space in which leading professionals collaborate and take risks. This aims to blow up the “let’s all get along and just work better together” niceties in favor of “Dream Teams” rallied around a kick-butt attitude of “We’re not leaving this war room until we solve this sucker!”

Second, it has a heavy-hitting leadership team. SU2C's leadership team ranges from a cancer surviver who also is a seasoned TV executive producer; the ever-popular Katie Couric; and reps from numerous powerful foundations, nonprofits, and research institutions. Cancer has touched each of them personally in some manner, making them incredibly determined, knowledgeable, and impatient for progress (hence, the sparks for innovation).

Third, they’re smart enough to know they’re still not smart enough to get to their goal: a cure for cancer as fast as possible. As a result, they allied themselves with the American Association for Cancer Research, which will rely on advice from a scientific advisory committee to vet proposed research projects and allocate the $100 mil to accelerate almost-there breakthroughs and speed new therapies to patients.

Fourth, the leadership team leveraged their considerable social networks in a big way, bringing in the kind of major donors that cause envy among us all--AARP, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Alliance for Global Good, and the Milken Family Foundation, for instance—and then convinced an unprecedented number of media partners—from online powerhouses like WebMD, Facebook, and AOL to ye ole traditional Hearst Corporation and The New York Times Company—to help jumpstart “a new movement.” It didn’t hurt that more than 100 celebrities also leapt on board.

We’ll have to see how and whether this “movement” does thrive to the grand-scale level of other well-recognized movements and whether it does indeed mark a tidal shift in cancer research and treatment, but the dramatic early days show great promise that may inspire others working to build a movement of our own. Maybe a wildly new bring-it-on attitude and fearlessness truly are the secret ingredients.