"The Mythical Man Month"

I was browsing through the net and caught a reference to "The Mythical Man Month" and it was nice to be reminded of this awesome book which will teach you all you ever need to know about project management. I had read it a long time back and I used to watch people mismanaging their tasks and projects and wonder why they kept making the same mistakes. All they had to do was read this book, no need for an MBA or PMP or whatever, and yet the same mistakes happen again and again. Look at Vietnam and Iraq or IBM and Microsoft. Then I went to Wiki, and there the following paragraph was a rather neat explanation. ( see part in italics ). You should check out the entire wiki entry here too...its a good read.

Brooks's observations are based on his experiences at IBM while managing the development of OS/360. To speed development, he mistakenly attempted to add more workers to a project falling behind schedule. He also asserted that writing an Algol compiler would require six months—regardless of the number of workers involved. The tendency for managers to repeat these errors led Brooks to quip that the book is called "The Bible of Software Engineering" because "everybody reads it but nobody does anything about it!"