>>98744270>Mike in the first movie is one average, lazy worker.While Mike doesn't do as much muscle work as Sully, he's clearly the one that keeps everything in check. Consider:
a) Monsters Inc. begins with Mike making sure Sully is in shape, he even stands on the sofa while being pushed and runs around the house with a paper cutout of a kid, so he does quite a bit of work.
b) It's clearly defined in MInc. that the Scare Teams consist of two: a Scare Monster and a Manager Monster. Only the Scare Monster's photo appears on the leaderboard, but the Manager Monster does quite some work behind the curtains: we see that they are the ones that pick the doors for their Scare Monsters, and given that Randall is only barely in 2nd place behind Sully, Mike must compensate by picking really good doors like the sleepover one which grants them a lot of scream energy in that scene.
c) We see Mike be constantly stalked by Ross, the slug secretary, to make sure he delivers his paperwork on time. In a later scene we see that Sully doesn't know jack shit about Mike's paperwork (when he discovers Boo's door), and even further we see Mike sitting on his desk at home with lots of papers, so clearly Mike does the paperwork alone, and it's a lot.
d) Even with all that work on his shoulders, he manages to have an active romantic life with Celia the receptionist, who clearly loves him deeply, going as far as to lie through the microphone to save him from Randall.
e) He does all this without breaking a sweat, he clearly has a lot of experience and alongside Sully is so good at his job that they're on friendly terms with Waternoose, the boss himself.
Clearly, Mike is not as lazy at all, and he's only able to achieve this precisely because he was such a nerd in University. There is no reversal of nothing, only a reinforcement of the implication that was present in the first movie: Sully is the brawn and Mike is the brains, and they are excelent at their job.
