South Africa is known for its good climate, metals and minerals and its nature and game reserves.

A new asset has been recognised worldwide - its calibre of leadership. Our nation is made of strong and resilient people who tackle change and challenges with courage, determination and skill. This is how the Boss of the Year Award has been profiled. What this statement says is something to be constantly remembered and restated - never to be taken for granted.

It is a special pleasure and honour for me to have been given the opportunity to be the messenger for this remembrance and restatement this year, today, as we once more come together for the 20th year, to acknowledge and celebrate leadership excellence in South Africa.

The most enduring societies around the world are distinguished by the strength of their institutions. There are institutions that transmit tested knowledge and social values from one generation to another.

There are those that ensure social stability and progress through the role of governance they play; those that produce and circulate goods and services to meet, particularly in modern times, every conceivable human need.

There are those which stimulate the human imagination through various art forms that get us to see the world in new ways.

The exceptional individuals we celebrate as Boss of the Year are the heart of the endurance of such institutions in our country today.

By identifying and recognising them we underscore the value they bring to human institutions through their exceptional ability to build their own institutions for the greater social good.

We express a debt of gratitude to them for making us feel confident of the future.

The six finalists for Boss of the Year 2009 were deemed by the panel of judges to have exceptional qualities of character, foresight, competence, ethical acumen and a sensitive understanding of people in their diversity and multiple contexts.

In a most inspiring way, they have brought these qualities to their institutions and profoundly shaped the people around them.

Specifically, these exceptional individuals invite others to experience the satisfaction of successful effort; they inspire by word and example; they offer understanding and support while being exacting in their demands; they sense and know that their power and authority will come from how they give away to others these two attributes of leadership, because they are always given back to them; they also know the power of acknowledged vulnerability; they have a sense of humour through which they can lighten the heavy burdens of the work place and increase productivity; and they know that new knowledge and inventiveness are at the heart of the success and sustainability of the institutions they lead.

Last year, the MTN Foundation became patron of Boss of the Year Award. We are proud to continue to play this role this year.

This way we are able to underscore the importance we place on communities that succeed because they value institutions and the capabilities which committed and capable individuals bring to their communities through the work they do.

We work with them to build social capacity through institutional capacity, particularly the capacity of networked institutions.

In the many projects we are involved in, in the areas of education, health, entrepreneurship as well as arts and culture, MTN SA Foundation strives to harness the innate skills of South Africans and support developing individuals and communities to assume responsibility of their futures.

And so, the men and women who have been nominated for this award come from the breadth and length of this country, and all have one thing in common.

They have been recognised by their colleagues and peers for demonstrating that high returns come less from aiming for them as such, than from how they are a natural outcome of the value of products to people that need them because of the substantial difference such products bring to their lives.

The knowledge and care embedded in the products; the creative organisational environment in which they are produced, lead to the only kind of return which, when it is achieved, it is as if we have won a race for which we have trained and prepared for years.

MTN SA Foundation is grateful to be identified with the Boss of the Year Award. It is good to be in partnership with organisers of the award - Dictum Publishers, and the founding sponsors, Stabilo.

Professor Njabulo Ndebele is the chairman of the MTN SA Foundation. This is an extract from the speech he made at the announcement of the 2009 Boss of the Year last month.