We present a new, simple algorithmic idea for exploiting the potential for bidirectional communication present in many modern interconnects for the collective MPI operations broadcast, reduction and scan. Our algorithms achieve up to twice the bandwidth of most previous and commonly used algorithms. In particular, our algorithms for reduction and scan are the currently best known. Experiments on clusters with Myrinet and InfiniBand interconnects show significant reductions in running time for broadcast and reduction, for reduction even close to the best possible factor of two.