Shire CEO Flem­ming Orn­skov is hatch­ing a few new stretch goals for R&D in 2018 — and be­yond

SAN FRAN­CIS­CO — Shire stock $SH­PG took a hit ear­li­er this week as in­vestors fret­ted over CEO Flem­ming Orn­skov’s con­ces­sion that the com­pa­ny isn’t go­ing to meet a longterm rev­enue goal he set for him­self, like­ly falling two or three bil­lion dol­lars shy of the $20 bil­lion en­vi­sioned for 2020.

That can hap­pen, Orn­skov tells me, when you set some stretch goals for your­self fol­low­ing a deal like the Bax­al­ta buy­out. You can push your­self and the com­pa­ny, push hard, but still get dinged by things like an un­ex­pect­ed gener­ic at­tack or an up­set win by a ri­val like Roche. Things hap­pen in this busi­ness you can’t al­ways pre­dict.

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