By control I mean how much do your actions and ability affect the final outcome. For instance a great chess player will win far more often than slightly worse player. The players have almost complete control over the game. Chance, other players, etc have very little control over the game. But in a hand of poker a very skilled player will only win slightly more often than a worse player, so he exerts far less influence over the outcome of the game.

So I think of being an individual contributor as playing chess for $100 and being a CEO as playing a hand of poker for $100,000.

And to take this analogy further you gain a lot of information about a chess player's skill by whether he wins, but very little from a single hand of poker. Did the poker player lose because he got a band hand or because he's a bad player. There is a similar difference between CEOs versus developers. You can figure out if a developer is any good by seeing how successfully he completes a project or task. But it is very hard to figure out how well a CEO is doing by just looking at his performance.