This is incredibly tragic—Clayton had the courage to leverage data in a very confined setting. A recipe that rarely works in academia (I’m a b-school prof/associate dean). And, all the ingredients to his disruption thesis were already there in his study of the hard-drive industry. His capacity to take that ball and carry it from academia across to the managerial end-zone is a mere pipe-dream for most. For Clayton, it was second nature.

His impact across both scholars and managers alike is—to this day—a singularity.