The notion, common among people too many abstraction barriers away from real humans, that productivity is a meaningful quantity.

"If one woman can have a baby in nine months, nine women could have a baby in one month!"

The title and subject of a book by Fred Brooks, often referred to as TMMM, which inspires nearly religious reverence among many computer types.

One of the most respected books on the subject of Software Engineering. Frederick P. Brooks Jr. worked for IBM, as a project manager for System/390 and OS/360.
The front cover has a picture of some bears and other wildlife, entitled "Mural of La Brea Tar Pits". (Chapter 1 is an essay entitled, The Tar Pit)

ISBN: 0-201-00650-2
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
First written 1975, Reprinted Jan 1982.

A seminal book about structuring and managing large software projects subtitled "Essays on Software Engineering". Written by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. Project manager for the development of the Operating System/360 for IBM. It was published in 1975 and still has much that is relevant even in current development environments. To a great extent this is the foundation upon which all later software development methodologies are based.

The Mythical Man-Month of the title refers to the spurious belief amongst some non-programming managers (PHB) that if it takes a programmer six-months to develop a module then six programmers could do the job in one month.

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Having looked at Brian Feldman's node below I realise I have to get a new copy as mine only has 15 chapters. I guess it is looking a little dog-eared.