So you guys could see me. So that tells you something about my height. Vice Chancellor Raal, directors, faculty, families, and most importantly, the BITS Pilani class of 2026. Congratulations. This is a big day. But before I start, I want to give a shout out to a few people. First, most importantly, my husband, Jan Mulun, who sits here today, who's been on a 30-year journey with me. He's put up with Bitsians for every event in our house. He's had to shepherd them through 2:00 a.m. and 3:00 a.m. bouts of music nights and everything else. So he understands the BITS journey more than anyone else. So thank you for being on this journey with me and your love and support.
To our children Pranav and Lakshmi who couldn't be here today with me but who talk about Bitsian aunties and uncles as a cult. They say everywhere you go there's a BITS auntie and uncle. Do we have to meet them everywhere we go? But they love their BITS aunties and uncles. If they are somewhere and they're having a bad day, they ask for something to be delivered and some Bitsian auntie shows up with that. That's the love that the Bitsian community has for my children and my family.
So I want to say thank you on behalf of them. And before we start, I do want to announce that as Professor Ralph said, Jiven, Pranav, Lakshmi and I are honored to make the endowment contribution of a million dollars to support those who are admitted to the Bitsian education but are not able to afford to be here. It's our honor and pleasure to be part of this journey and we're hopeful that many young girls will benefit from this.
I couldn't start by not giving a shout out to the 86 batch. So 86 was the year we joined. So to the 86 batch of BITS Pilani who's probably listening some of you today to this conversation, I want to thank you for the 40-year journey that you've been with me on and particularly to the girls of the 86 batch. Those four years in Meera Bhavan was so impactful for us. They have been my love and support. They've been through my ups and downs and they have spent every day of the last 40 years on this journey with us. I couldn't do this without you. So, thank you to the BITS girls of 1986.
I will say standing on the stage in this institute that I graduated from 36 years ago and looking at this crowd, this is a moment that I have been waiting for a very long time. So today I'm not going to give you exactly one thing that I'm going to talk about. It won't be like three or five. It was not going to be a whole lot of education, but it's going to be just two words that I'm going to talk about. And you're going to hear those two words for the next few minutes. And these are the two words I wish somebody had walked up to me and put it in my hands the day I graduated from this campus in 1990. I did not have it then. I earned it. I earned it slowly, painfully over the next two decades. One job, hard job at a time, one hard conversation at a time. And the most useful thing I can do with the 20 minutes you've given me, hopefully it'll be shorter, so put up with me, is to hand them to you directly so you don't have to spend the next 20 years earning them like I did. So the two words are ready enough.
Ready enough. Let me talk to you about what they mean. What does it mean to be ready? Let me start with that. Because for most of my adult life and for most of yours, if you're anything like me, ready is the word that has stopped us. Are you ready for the job? Are you ready for the promotion? Are you ready for the risk? Are you ready for the leap? Are you ready for your marriage? Are you ready for the conversation that you've been avoiding? The world tells you that ready is a state that you can reach, a checklist that you can complete. You have enough experience. You have enough credentials. You have enough certainty. You have enough confidence. You have enough. You have enough. You have enough. That's what the world tells you. But I'm here to tell you that the world is lying to you. There is no one alive who's ready the way you have been told what ready looks like. Not the CEO who's going to promote you. Not the boss you're afraid of. Not the successful uncle at your cousin's wedding who's telling you exactly what to do with your career. Not me. I stand here as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. I've been named one of the most powerful women in the world. And I promise you that on most weeks I don't feel ready either. Ready is a lie. Ready enough is a decision.
And I want to tell you what I learned that from my mother, who I talk about often, Amma as she's known to me, taught me the first half of that phrase. I was 15 when my father died. He was a chemical engineer. Suddenly, he had there was an accident. He was home from work one day and then he was not. He left my mother who had no formal education, no job, no income, no plan with five daughters. This was in 1983. I was the youngest. Amma had no reason to believe she was ready to raise five girls alone. She had no experience. She had no money and she had no map for it. If she had waited until she was ready, we would have starved. Instead, she did what I now know is the most powerful thing anyone in my family has ever done. She looked at her five daughters. She looked at what she had, which was almost nothing. And she decided that nothing was enough. She had one asset. She refused to be broken. She sent me here when she had no money and the fees was around 15,000 rupees a year to the campus in 1986.
And I want to tell you something that I don't always admit but I'm quite public about that I almost did not graduate from this institute. I was not a serious student. I came to Pilani from Chennai with no plan and no discipline. I'm not sure Professor Ra wants me to tell this story, but I made a lot of friends. I had a great time in Pilani. I had fun. I chose mechanical engineering as my discipline. It turned out I was the only girl in the class. In those days, there was not much research to be done on what major you were going to be in. There was no Google. So, I picked something that I thought would be hands-on. And for nearly four years that I was here on campus, I did not pay attention to academics. I was enjoying my life, music club, Oasis, all the fun stuff I was taking time to do. Well, the grade cards arrived at home. I heard these days it's different. It doesn't get mailed to your home in an envelope, but in those days it came by in a post. And I want you to imagine the 20-year-old girl that I was. I was sprinting to the gate of her house, trying to physically intercept the mailman, the postman, before he reached the gate so my mother wouldn't see the grade card. The postman, who unfortunately knew me well and my mother even better, was not interested in giving me the grade card. My mother opened the mail, saw the grade card, she put it down on the table, and she said to me, and I would like every parent who's listening to this to think about this very carefully and not do this to your children because it worked terrifyingly well on me. She said, 'We have two choices, Revathi. Either you finish college or I get you married.' Those were my two choices. 1987, you either finish college or I'll get you married. What do you think I did? I finished college. Not with great grades, but I finished college. I was definitely not getting on any of those medals that you saw that was being awarded. I was not on the dean's list. Not in any way that anyone in this room would have predicted any greatness from. But I finished. That was Amma's lesson to me. And today I hand it to you. You do not need to be ready. You just need to finish like all of you are doing today. But then you need to start.
But the best part of Pilani was never the classroom. Now, don't tell your teachers that we're all sitting here at this stage because if I stand on this stage and I only tell you about the story from Amma about the ultimatum she gave me and then the story I'm going to share about work, I would have lied to you about how I got here. I did not get here alone. The best part of Pilani was not the classrooms. It was not the lectures and it was not honestly the degree. It was the people. It was the friends I made on this campus in those four years. Friends who came from every state in the country, who spoke different languages at home, who prayed to different gods and who somehow in this small dusty town in Rajasthan became my family. The transcripts will fade, the friendships won't. So I want to name one friend of mine specifically today because I will not stand on this stage and pretend I got here on my own. Her name is Radha Mimi. Radha and I met at Meera Bhavan almost 40 years ago. Four decades later, she's still one of my closest friends. She's not here today, but she is in every sentence I'm about to say.
You need to understand something about the moment I graduated from BITS. My grades as we talked about were not promotional. My chances of getting into a good graduate program was non-existent in India was definitely non-existent in the US. I didn't have a record to go on and do the next thing. I did not have the confidence to do the next thing or the money to dream about it. But what I had was my friend Radha. Radha had gone to the University of Oklahoma before me and she walked into that admissions office and she made a case for me that I could not have made for myself. She told them what my grade card did not tell about them. She told them who I actually was. She convinced them to take a chance on a girl they had never met, on the word of a friend who believed in her. I did not get to America on my grades. I got to America because of my Bitsian friend. Every single thing that happened in my life since the career, the company, the family Jim and I have built, the fact that I'm standing on this stage is on the other side of one friend deciding I was worth the bet and making that bet for me before I could make it for myself.
So when I look back at Pilani today, I do not remember the classrooms. I remember Meera Bhavan. I remember Sky Lab and Papuji. All the bodies we had with him. The hours we spent there solving world problems. I remember the fried paneer Maggie that should not have tasted as good as it did. I remember the temple visits. I remember the long conversations until dawn about who we were going to become. They were not distractions from my education. That was my education. So to the class of 2026, right now look at the person sitting next to you. Look at the person sitting behind you. The one three rows down from you that you've been sitting near for the last four years. Those people are not the sideshow of your BITS education. They are the point. 20 years from now when one of them walks into a room that you're not in and vouches for you, you will understand what I am telling you today. Thank you, Radha. This chair belongs to you as much as it belongs to me.
So, back to the conversation about ready enough. The second half of the phrase, the enough part I learned 22 years later. I was living in Shanghai, China. That's a longer story while we were there. The year was 2012. I was around 44 years old. My husband Jiven and I living there with our two young children. I was running a one and a half billion dollar division of an American power company called Eaton Corporation and I think I'm doing reasonably well. It's the evening. I'm heading home and my phone rings. My boss who's the chief operating officer calls me and says, 'The company wants to promote you. They want me to move to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And they wanted me to run the North American electrical business. $10 billion, the biggest job below the suite. The job that if I do well would one day put me in the CEO chair.' I could have said yes. I could have said thank you. I'm honored. I will make you proud. I could have said why not me? But instead, I said, 'No, not interested.' I told him, 'The people I would be jumping over had been in the electrical industry for 30 years, and I had been there for three.' I told him, and this is true, by the way, I don't know much about electrical systems. Actually, if a circuit breaker tripped in our house, I wouldn't know how to reset the breaker. And I told them that to succeed in the United States in such a big job in an industrial space which was male-dominated and needed me to visit customers in every small town from Alabama to North Dakota. It needed to be a person that had lived that life. I had not lived that life. I did not hunt. I did not fish. I did not golf. And to me it seemed like those were the prerequisites for the job. And then I said the sentence I would give anything to take back. I said, 'I don't think I can do this job, Tom.' Well, he hung up. An hour later, my phone rings again. It was the CEO of the company himself and he said, 'Revathi, nobody is perfectly ready for any job. You are ready enough.' He said, 'You are ready enough.' So, class of 2026, sit with that for a second. Because what he was telling me was not that I was already great at the job. What he was telling me was somehow that the bar I had constructed in my own head, the bar at which I would somehow already have done a job I had not yet done, was a bar nobody in the history of any company had ever cleared. Not him, not the men who had been promoted before me, nor the men who would be promoted after me. Nobody walks in ready. The one who gets the job and walks in is ready enough. I took the job on those two words that he said I was ready enough. Three years later, I was promoted as chief operating officer. Four years later, I was named the CEO of Flex. I've held that job for seven years. Every good thing that has happened in my life since then, the company we've built, the work we have done, the lives Jiven and I have given our children is on the other side of this phone call where I almost said no.
Now, let me tell you what ready enough means when the world is on fire. Last year, while leading my company through one of the most consequential strategic transformations in our history, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Now, I'm not telling you this for sympathy. I'm telling you this because I need you to hear this one lesson clearly and remember it long after you have forgotten my name. This is a version of ready that lives in our heads that none of us actually live in. The version where we're at full strength, full clarity, full health. Everything's lined up. You've slept well. You have full confidence. You have full certainty. Nobody's sick. Nothing is broken. The future is clear. That version of Ready is fiction. Nobody gets it. But the work happens anyway. The good marriages happen anyway. The raised children happen anyway. The built companies happen anyway. The hard phone calls happen anyway. They happen because on a difficult day at half strength, you decided that what you have is enough. Ready enough is not a phrase for the days you feel your best. It is a phrase for the days you don't. And I'm telling you this so you know. Most of the days of the rest of your career, you will not feel your best. This is not a warning. This is a promise. Live your career as if the difficult day is the normal day because it is. Ready enough is the muscle that gets you through it.
Now, I'll give you a short charge and then I'll let you graduate. To my favorite people in this room, the women, the young girls graduating from BITS Pilani today. I see you. I know how many more of you there is today than there was in my class. So that gives me real hope. I want you to hear this from me. From a woman who has sat where you sit. From a woman who was told she was not ready over and over for jobs that men with less experience were getting. Nobody is ready. Not the man at the next desk, not the man getting the promotion, not your professor, not your boss, not me, not the person telling you you're not ready either. Nobody is ready. The right answer to the question is, are you ready? And remember, you're ready enough to walk into the room, take the job, raise your hand, say yes. And to the graduating men from BITS Pilani today, young men, most of you are younger than my son. Most of the leaders of the next 40 years will come from the people sitting here today. And most of them statistically is going to be one of you men. So I'm asking you one thing. The next time you are in a room and a name comes up for promotion and somebody says she's not quite ready, I want you to ask out loud in front of everyone. Compared to whom? Compared to the man we promoted last quarter who's also figuring it out as he goes. Compared to a standard of ready that nobody in this room has ever met. Ask the question every single time. That one small act repeated by enough men of your generation will close the gap that no policy in mind has been able to close.
So to all of you, the question of your next decade is not am I ready. The question has no answer. The question is why not me. When the phone rings, say yes. When the door opens, walk through it. When the doubt comes, and it will come, and it'll come from the person you trust the most, which is you. I want you to remember a girl who almost did not graduate from this institute, who told the CEO of a Fortune 500 company that she could not take a job that was a significant promotion, but who's standing on the stage today telling you the only two words that she has that are worth anything. You are ready enough. BITS Pilani class of 2026, you are ready enough. Now go change the world. Thank you.
