BNET is a good source for insightful articles, news, and blogs. In particular, their blog "The You in Team" (which takes its name from the tired old adage, "There is no ‘I’ in ‘team’"), authored by Jeff Palfini, has frequent posts and lots of intriguing commentary about the nature of teams, teamwork, and how we all work together in a flat-world, "Workforce 2.0" environment.

Among many good posts, a recent favorite is: "A Two-Way Street Will Get You There and Back Quicker," about the value of enabling communication from the bottom up, as well as from the top down, within any team, large or small. For example, the post tells the story about how one CEO’s ability to listen to a junior engineer led to Sun’s development of the Java platform.

Not only is the "two-way street" a good idea on a philosophical level, but technology-enabled collaboration is simply making it an imperative. We see this everywhere, from "The Great Firewall of China"–where even one of the world’s most powerful governments is threatened by public communication and collaboration–to the ways corporations are optimizing their business practices around new collaboration tools.

As much as we talk, write and blog about global communication and collaboration, and the leveling of the playing field, the "two-way street" philosophy appears to be a difficult lesson for humans to learn. Yet it is clear that we are in the midst of making this fundamental shift in our ways of thinking and working together.