Why picking projects is like poker

An image showing a risky poker hand

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Sometimes you prefer the high-risk, high-reward project to the ‘sure thing’

Every big R&D-driven organisation has a range of projects underway. I’ve worked in drug research my entire industrial career, and ‘portfolio management’ is its own field, laden with voodoo though it sometimes is. If you run too many projects, none of them can be given enough resources to succeed. Too few, and you put yourself at risk of debilitating failures with little backup.