30 Years of Romance of the Three Kingdoms Collection: A Story Blooming from Paper Books to a Café on Ganghwa Island — Innovation in the Field by Kim Gap-yong, CEO of #SamminamTV
The Question That Started in the Bookshelf of the Three Kingdoms On a quiet street in Ganghwаgun, Incheon City, there is a space called 'Doyuan Covena...
The Question That Started in the Bookshelf of the Three Kingdoms
On a quiet street in Ganghwа-gun, Incheon City, there is a space called 'Doyuan Covenant Café.' The moment visitors open the door, what first catches their eyes is books. Thousands of editions of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms fill the display cases. First editions, out-of-print editions, overseas versions, special editions—a space reminiscent of a special exhibition hall in a museum. The protagonist of this place is CEO Kim Gap-yong.
"One day when my bookshelf was running out of space, I realized something. If I wanted to continue collecting, I would have to hang books on the walls," he says. It sounds like a joke, but this is the backstory behind the creation of the Doyuan Covenant Café on Ganghwa Island. A collector who had been gathering Romance of the Three Kingdoms for 30 years encountered a problem one day. When a personal hobby exceeded the limitations of space, he made a choice: not concealment but disclosure, not storage but sharing.
This decision became the foundation of #SamminamTV—'Men Obsessed with the Three Kingdoms'—a YouTube channel led by Kim Gap-yong and Shim Jae-woo, representatives of the Three Kingdoms AI Talent Research Institute. Rather than a simple content channel, it has become a field of practical experimentation that interprets future talent in the AI era through examples from the Three Kingdoms.
From "30 Years of Book Collecting" to "Field Penetration"
Field penetration ability (現場浸透力) is one of the five competencies of FDE-type talent. It is the ability to discover contexts and constraints beyond documents. And this is exactly the competency that CEO Kim Gap-yong acquired through 30 years of collecting the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
For the first 30 years, he collected books. It was not simple collecting but comparative collecting. He would place editions that interpreted the same scene differently side by side and read them. One translator emphasized Zhuge Liang's strategy, while another highlighted relationships between characters. Though the same story, completely different worlds unfolded depending on the angle.
"If there are 100 ways to explain Zhuge Liang, all 100 can be correct." This realization was important. Why? Because it was not merely book knowledge but an attitude that acknowledges diverse perspectives of people looking at the same problem in the field.
Doyuan Covenant Café: When a Bookshelf Becomes an Exhibition Space
On the day the Doyuan Covenant Café on Ganghwa Island opened, CEO Kim Gap-yong witnessed changes he had never experienced before. The way people viewed books changed.
Café visitors did not simply read books. They encountered the Three Kingdoms in the field through books. In one hand they held an edition of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, in the other they held related artifacts on the café table. They read the explanations of the artifacts and compared book covers. And they talked with people next to them. "Oh? This part is different in this book." "What is this artifact for?"
This is precisely problem definition ability. Initially, the problem CEO Kim Gap-yong tried to solve was "Where should I store these books?" But upon opening the café, he discovered the real problem. "People don't want to read the Three Kingdoms alone; they want to encounter it alongside context." "The Three Kingdoms should become a means of seeing the structure of relationships and the field before it becomes a book."
#SamminamTV: From Field Penetration to Relationship Translation
In 2024, CEOs Kim Gap-yong and Shim Jae-woo launched a YouTube channel called '#SamminamTV.' It was not a simple Three Kingdoms commentary channel.
On one side was the authenticity accumulated through 30 years of collecting Romance of the Three Kingdoms and operating the Doyuan Covenant Café, and on the other side was modern organizational theory in AI, FDE, and ontology. At the intersection of these two worlds, a question was born: "Why didn't Zhuge Liang create an FDE organization?"
Relationship translation ability (Relationship Translation) is the third of FDE's five competencies. It is the ability to connect different languages of fieldwork and technology, management and operations. #SamminamTV does exactly this.
"How would the characters of the Three Kingdoms appear from the perspective of future talent in the AI era?" Content that begins with this question unfolds as follows:
Ontology Thinking: From Books to Screen to Field
The fifth of FDE's five competencies is 'learning institutionalization.' It is leaving experience as a reusable organizational asset.
How did CEO Kim Gap-yong's 30 years of collecting experience and café operation experience become institutionalized as digital content?
The answer is 'ontology.' Ontology is a way of thinking that sees "what connects to what and why." It is explicitly structuring people, events, resources, objectives, rules, actions, and relationships. Videos on #SamminamTV follow the following ontology structure:
Stage 1: Present historical figures and events (Zhuge Liang's Rong Zhong strategy)
Stage 2: Decompose relationships and context (terrain, forces, talent, legitimacy, alliances, time connections)
Stage 3: Translate into modern organizational concepts (strategy, diplomacy, administration, logistics FDE integration)
Stage 4: Restructure into field execution language (decision-making principles for corporations and individuals)
Through this process, 30 years of personal collecting experience becomes a reusable interpretive framework.
From Individual Accumulation to Organizational Repeatability
"If individual excellence does not transform into organizational repeatable capabilities, genius becomes the greatest risk to the organization." This is the core sentence of the book 'Why Didn't Zhuge Liang Create an FDE Organization?'
The journey CEO Kim Gap-yong experienced was in the opposite direction. Individual accumulation (30 years of collecting) gradually became organizational systems (Ganghwa Island café), and finally transformed into a replicable interpretation model (#SamminamTV + FDE framework).
The core of this transformation is as follows:
Before (Personal Collecting Stage)
Process (Café Operation Stage)
After (#SamminamTV Field Verification Stage)
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What does collecting editions of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms have to do with developing future talent in the AI era?
A: The core is the ability to interpret the same event from diverse perspectives. CEO Kim Gap-yong's 30 years of collecting experience was a learning experience that taught "the same problem can be defined in multiple ways." This precisely aligns with problem definition ability—the ability to accurately identify important problems in ambiguous field situations.
Q: For what purpose does the Doyuan Covenant Café on Ganghwa Island operate?
A: The café is not simply a café but a 'field penetration' experiential space. It is designed so that as visitors encounter the Three Kingdoms directly through books, artifacts, and conversation, knowledge from books is understood as relationships and structures in the field. Monthly exhibitions and lectures related to specific figures (Zhuge Liang, Cao Cao, Guan Yu, etc.) are held.
Q: What kind of channel is #SamminamTV?
A: It is not a 'TV broadcast station' but a 'field laboratory.' The two representatives of the Three Kingdoms AI Talent Research Institute, Kim Gap-yong and Shim Jae-woo, reread characters from the Three Kingdoms from the perspective of FDE (field problem solvers) in the AI era and ontology, deriving the competencies of future talent in modern times from the successes and failures of organizations in history. New videos are uploaded monthly, and questions from Doyuan Covenant Café visitors sometimes become the subject of the next month's video.
Conclusion: "Innovation That Started in a Bookshelf Reaches the Field"
30 years ago, one individual's book collecting hobby began as a bookshelf problem. The moment he chose to solve that problem through 'disclosure' rather than 'concealment,' individual accumulation became an organizational field. Through the physical space of the Doyuan Covenant Café, in conversations with visitors, he discovered the real problem—"the Three Kingdoms should become a means of seeing relationships and structures"—and is now restructuring that discovery into an explicit framework called ontology and verifying it in the field through #SamminamTV videos.
This is the complete circulation of FDE competencies.
In an era where AI generates answers, we need people who define problems in the field and connect people, data, and tools to create repeatable results. #SamminamTV and CEO Kim Gap-yong's Three Kingdoms project are precisely the field where that model is being directly executed, published, and demonstrated.
For more details about the Three Kingdoms AI Talent Research Institute, visits to the Doyuan Covenant Café, #SamminamTV subscriptions, and FDE Future Talent Workshop consultations, please contact 010-2397-5734 or jaiwshim@gmail.com.