I thought I’d pull out and publish some quotes from my brand new book about happiness at work:
“Seriously: Do you want to spend your working life simply being satisfied? When you look back on 50 years spent in business, do you want to be able to say, “Well, I was satisfied???? No! Make happiness your goal. As in, “Let’s make this a workplace where people are happy to work.??? As in, “I’ve been working for 50 years now, and it absolutely rocks! To me work is challenging, stimulating and just plain fun.??? ”
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“Imagine for a moment how it would feel to lie in bed on a Monday morning going “YES! I get to go to work this week!???”
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“Studies consistently show that happy companies are way more productive, creative and service-oriented than unhappy ones. Therefore, the happy companies will beat the pants off the unhappy ones in the market place. The future of business is happy! It’s inevitable.”
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“See, happiness at work is an emotion. It comes from inside of you, and like all other emotions it is difficult to define, but inescapable once it’s present. Or not present. Can you define love? Poets have tried for thousands of years and aren’t getting much closer. But when you’re feeling love, you’re acutely aware of it, even though you have no formal definition.”
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“You can’t be happy at work every day. No matter how much you love your job, there are still going to be bad days. And that’s cool—it’s always OK to have a bad day at work.”
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“Happiness at work is not about eliminating all the bad stuff from your job. It’s about being happy at work even though some of these bad things are present. It’s about building your skills and your energy to fix the problems, and to create more and more positive experiences at work.”
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“The path to happiness at work starts with a simple decision: You must want to be happy. If you don’t commit to being happy at work, you won’t be. You won’t make the choices that make you happy. You won’t take the actions needed to get there. You won’t change the things that need to change.”
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All of these are plucked from just the introduction and the first chapter. Hey – that book is pretty quotable :o) You can buy it or read the whole book free online.
A strong competent leader is a wonderful asset. So is a strong competent bonded team. These don’t have to be mutually exclusive although many strong leaders do interfere with team dynamics. The team has a higher “truck number”. (as in “How many of us can get hit by a truck before we’re doomed”? – a useful risk metric for project work). 
If you’re going to turn on an innovation engine, a lot depends on whether managers listen for the brilliance in their employees’ ideas that they can then help test, or whether they listen for what’s wrong and why it won’t work.
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. 
Ernie Zelinski emailed me a copy of his free e-book “1001 best things ever said about work” and I gotta say that that’s quite the quote collection.