Simply human nature. You see the same behavior with team sports. Both on being positive and negative. Lebby is the first CEO at Lightwave really worth bragging about but there was a lot of Z praise and allusions to the company being a ship. The S.S. Minnow?
I don't know of anyone bragging about Jim or Hal Bennett much when they were CEO. Smith and his sons started a multi-billion dollar company from scratch, that doesn't happen every day. Didn't benefit Lightwave much.