Collaboration. The word rolls off the tongue — easy to say — but much harder to define. There is of course the Latin root we can look to for guidance: from ‘con’ meaning with and ‘laboro’ meaning work. Put together it would seem that collaboration simply means to ‘work with’.
In many fields where people work side by side the word collaboration is rarely used. Do surgeons and anesthetists collaborate? Even in massive creative endeavors such as building, where architects work closely with engineers and builders, their combined efforts are not referred to as collaboration; rather, they are all just doing their jobs.
