Tom Peters made his name as a management guru by analysing what made big US companies successful.

In Search of Excellence - the hugely influential 1982 bestseller he co-authored with Robert Waterman - scrutinised Caterpillar, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson and 40 other businesses the pair had deemed to be “excellent”.

Now, in an audio interview with the FT Management Blog, he says their focus on the largest beasts was a “guru gaffe” that helped to create a lingering misconception that the global economy is merely a division of General Electric.

These days, the companies that get him excited tend to be small- to medium-sized enterprises operating in dull industries: companies like Jim’s Group, an Australian franchiser whose activities range from lawn mowing to dog washing, or members of the German Mittelstand.

“There are actually more companies than GE in the world,” he says. And that goes for Google too.

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The new McKinsey Quarterly has an excellent interview with Brad Bird, the Oscar-winning Pixar director responsible for The Incredibles and Ratatouille. Among other things, Mr Bird describes how he persuaded Pixar’s animators to strike a balance between perfectionism and expediency.

There are purists in computer graphics who are brilliant but don’t have the urgency about budgets and scheduling that responsible filmmakers do. I had to shake the purist out of them—essentially frighten them into realizing I was ready to use quick and dirty “cheats” to get something on screen if they took too long to achieve it in the computer.

He describes the value of having what he calls “black sheep” in a team: frustrated but committed individuals who want to do things differently but haven’t had the chance to prove their theories. He also praises Pixar for offering staff optional classes that foster a well-rounded workforce.

If you work in lighting but you want to learn how to animate, there’s a class to show you animation. There are classes in story structure, in Photoshop, even in Krav Maga, the Israeli self-defense system.

His peeves include “passive-aggressive people… who don’t show their colours in the group but then get behind the scenes and peck away”.

It is hard to find a chief executive these days who doesn’t claim to be fostering innovation. Gary Hamel, the influential management theorist, has a sensible way of figuring out which ones are lying.

In an interview published in the latest edition of McKinsey Quarterly, he reveals a series of questions that he puts to rank-and-file employees when trying to assess whether their bosses are wholeheartedly committed to grass roots experimentation. The second of these questions is particularly astute. If you have a new idea, Mr Hamel asks, how long would it take you to get clearance to devote 20 per cent of your time and $5,000 of the company’s cash to testing it in practice?

Mr Hamel, co-author of The Future of Management, is a fan of Google, whose employees are encouraged to develop side projects on company time in the hope that these ideas will eventually pay off commercially. He clearly believes that less funky companies could and should give staff the same leeway - but accepts that this is far from being the case in the majority of cases. “In most companies there’s still a big gap between the rhetoric of innovation and the reality,” he concludes.