Another phrase with similar meaning (and interesting history) is "festina lente" ("make haste slowly," in Latin). I named my company after it (:
It's certainly an ancient concept. I feel like software is ultimately about humans organizing complex activities, and humans haven't changed that much in the past few millennia, even if the activities have gotten more complex and abstract.
I feel like the ones-size-fits-all approach of trying to say approach X or Y is superior (eg: scrum vs. kanban vs. waterfall, etc) is totally off the mark. Different sorts of work require different sorts of effort. Creative and full-of-unknowns work is different from assembly-line sort of work is different from maintenance work, etc.
On a meta level, I think part of the "slow is smooth..." philosophy is to take a deep breath at the beginning and think about what sorts of approaches are going to be best suited for the tasks at hand. As opposed to some mindless "scrum is in, so we'll do that for everything". Or "everyone is using NoSQL now, so we should too" or any number of other cargo-cult-y behaviors.
Festina Lente!