The Day 20 Years of Romance of the Three Kingdoms Collecting Transformed into an Educational Platform, Doyuan Gyeol Café in Ganghwado Opened

A café in Ganghwa-gun, Incheon greets visitors with something different than ordinary lattes and cakes. Doyuan Gyeol Café—its walls are filled with over 30 editions of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, woodblock prints from the Ming-Qing dynasties, various exhibition materials, and classical content accumulated over 20 years. This was the moment when Kim Gap-yong, CEO of Three Kingdoms TV, transformed the Three Kingdoms assets he had long collected and organized from a simple personal collection into a space for contemporary organizational and talent education.

"It started as a simple hobby. I fell in love while reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms and began collecting books one by one," said CEO Kim Gap-yong. As his words suggest, this journey began from one individual's obsession. However, as 20 years accumulated, his collection transformed from a simple collection of books into a vast organizational database where characters, relationships, organizations, and decision-making were tightly interconnected. A meeting with CEO Shim Jae-woo became the catalyst for reinterpreting this accumulation. He, who defined the conditions for future talent in the AI era as "problem discovery × relationship translation × execution × institutionalization of learning," realized upon seeing figures in Romance of the Three Kingdoms that Zhuge Liang, Cao Cao, Lu Su, and Sima Yi were all archetypes of modern FDE (Forward Deployed Engineer).

"Romance of the Three Kingdoms, beyond war narratives, is a casebook of organizational practices—finding talent in uncertain environments, building alliances, and deploying resources." This realization became the starting point for reconstructing Kim Gap-yong's 20-year collection. Doyuan Gyeol Café in Ganghwado was not merely a space to display books. Each section embodied contemporary organizational questions: "Who needs talent?", "Why does legitimacy matter?", and "What language builds alliances?"

•Layering of Content: Reusing the same assets across books → exhibition spaces → educational workshops → YouTube channels

•Addition of On-Site Relevance: Through comparison of 30+ editions, deriving different organizational design implications from the same events based on different interpretations

•Reconstruction of Problem Definition: Shifting focus from "Who has capability?" to "Who structures field problems?"

"If an individual's excellence does not convert into an organization's repeatable capability, genius becomes the organization's greatest risk." This proposition became not merely a historical interpretation but the core question that the Three Kingdoms AI Talent Research Institute presents to modern enterprises. What Zhuge Liang left behind were remarkable strategies, but the fact that these methods never settled into a repeatable organizational system after Shu Han is highly significant.

As AI becomes universal, human competitiveness shifts from "tool usage" to "field change." To explain this, CEOs Kim Gap-yong and Shim Jae-woo present the following evolutionary path:

AI Usage: Universalization of answer generation, coding, and tools

Problem Definition: Determining context and priorities of what to solve

Field Execution: Connecting people and data to actual results

Institutionalization: Accumulating knowledge and processes into repeatable organizational assets

Cases in Romance of the Three Kingdoms already demonstrated these four stages 2,000 years ago. Zhuge Liang's *Rong Zhong Dui* (融中對) was an ontology design connecting terrain, forces, talent, legitimacy, alliances, and time into one long-term strategy, while Cao Cao's *Tun Tian* (屯田) was an example of structuring agriculture, population, military supplies, administration, and talent into one operational system.

As Doyuan Gyeol Café in Ganghwado opened its doors, the Three Kingdoms text stopped being "a story of the past" and began functioning as "a diagnostic tool for the present." Rather than corporate leaders learning Zhuge Liang's decision-making, they began discovering how "Zhuge Liang's traps" (excessive concentration, lack of delegation, tacit knowledge dependency) are repeatedly reproduced in their own organizations.

•Diagnostic Function: When customers see Doyuan Gyeol Café's exhibits, they judge whether their organization is trapped in a "Zhuge Liang model trap" or has diversified in "Cao Cao's portfolio approach"

•Education Fieldification: In-person experiences at Doyuan Gyeol Café are recirculated into YouTube content, corporate workshops, and diagnostic tools

•Visualization of Institutionalization: Abstract organizational concepts like legitimacy (why people follow), terrain (where to fight), and supplies (what to sustain) become concrete through actual spaces and objects

The FDE 5 Capabilities presented by Three Kingdoms TV and the Three Kingdoms AI Talent Research Institute are composed as follows:

•Problem Definition Ability: Precisely defining important problems (Zhuge Liang diagnosing "Liubei's weaknesses" and designing *Rong Zhong Dui*)

•Field Infiltration Ability: Discovering context and constraints beyond documents (Deng Ai finding the field path in an "impossible-seeming" situation of Luoyang's fall)

•Relationship Translation Ability: Connecting the languages of operations, technology, and management (Lu Su translating the interests of Sun Quan and Liu Bei into the language of alliance)

•Experimental Execution Ability: Proving value through small MVPs (Sima Yi's accumulation of small experiments on "resource depletion and trust management over large battles")

•Learning Institutionalization: Accumulating experiences into standards and assets (Cao Cao's talent portfolio building method)

The key strategy is demonstrating how these five capabilities manifest in the figures of Romance of the Three Kingdoms through the exhibits and media of Doyuan Gyeol Café in Ganghwado.

"Ontology is a way of thinking that asks 'what connects why?'" CEO Shim Jae-woo's definition precisely aligns with Kim Gap-yong's 20-year accumulation method. The ontology of Romance of the Three Kingdoms presented by Doyuan Gyeol Café views people → events → resources → goals → rules → actions → relationships as one system.

The Three Kingdoms AI Talent Research Institute has structured this into four major cases:

Zhuge Liang's *Rong Zhong Dui*: Connecting terrain, forces, talent, legitimacy, alliances, and time into one long-term strategy

Lu Su's Sun-Liu Alliance: Redefining enemies and allies not as fixed attributes but as relationships of goals and circumstances

Cao Cao's *Tun Tian*: Designing agriculture, population, military supplies, administration, and talent as one operational system

Sima Yi's Long War: Managing resource depletion, political trust, successor structure, and time over battles

These four cases offer methodologies to resolve the core conflicts facing organizations in the AI era: "individual optimization vs. system optimization," "short-term performance vs. long-term building," and "individual capability vs. organizational capacity."

After Kim Gap-yong's 20-year accumulation settled in Doyuan Gyeol Café in Ganghwado, this content began being reproduced across various channels. Three Kingdoms TV was repositioned not as a simple Three Kingdoms commentary channel but as "a knowledge channel finding future talent and organizational direction through Romance of the Three Kingdoms."

•Content Expansion Path: Books (*Why Didn't Zhuge Liang Build an FDE Organization?*) → YouTube (Three Kingdoms TV) → diagnostics and education → corporate workshops → exhibition and café experience → knowledge platform

•Role of Each Channel: Books convey concepts, YouTube reinterprets characters and events, cafés provide embodied field experience, workshops provide organizational diagnosis and design

•Repeatable Asset Building: The 20-year accumulation expertise does not end with a single book publication but is reconstructed according to media, channels, and customer segments

Companies that adopted the FDE ontology framework through Doyuan Gyeol Café in Ganghwado and Three Kingdoms TV reported the following changes:

Before: "We adopted AI but results aren't coming," "We have data but why isn't decision-making changing?", "We have excellent individuals but the organization is weak"

Process: Beginning to diagnose current organizational structure through Three Kingdoms cases and discovering Zhuge Liang's traps (excessive concentration, tacit knowledge dependency) in their own organizations

After: The five-step process of problem definition → field infiltration → relationship translation → experimental execution → learning institutionalization becomes an explicit process, and individual excellence begins converting into the organization's repeatable capability

Q: If Zhuge Liang was the best FDE, why didn't he leave behind an organization?

A: Zhuge Liang was responsible for strategy, diplomacy, administration, military supplies, and field execution all at once. However, this means his judgment standards, decision-making processes, and crisis-overcoming expertise were never structured. There was insufficient delegation of authority, and successors had limited opportunities to experience actual responsibility. An organization dependent on tacit knowledge becomes a vacuum the moment that individual disappears.

Q: Why did Cao Cao build an organization that lasted longer than Zhuge Liang?

A: Cao Cao's strength was not "finding one type of talent" but "combining different strengths as a portfolio." Because figures like Xun You, Xun Yu, and Jia Xu each played different roles, the organization could function even without Cao Cao making every decision. This connects to the modern business concept of "cross-functional teams."

Q: Is learning at Doyuan Gyeol Café in Ganghwado actually helpful in real work?

A: Doyuan Gyeol Café is not merely a space to view old stories. Through figures and events in Romance of the Three Kingdoms, you can diagnose your organization's current state. You can ask "What institutionalization stage is our company at?", "Is individual dependency too high?", "Is field voice reflected in decision-making?" This is the starting point for organizational design in the AI era.

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms collection accumulated over 20 years by Kim Gap-yong, CEO of Three Kingdoms TV, has transformed at Doyuan Gyeol Café in Ganghwado into a diagnostic tool for modern organizations. This goes beyond simply "reinterpreting classics." The four-step process experienced by Zhuge Liang, Cao Cao, Lu Su, and Sima Yi—"talent discovery → relationship structuring → execution systematization → learning institutionalization"—has become an implementation framework helping organizations that have adopted AI to achieve the transition from "tool usage to field change."

Doyuan Gyeol Café in Ganghwado, Three Kingdoms TV, and the forthcoming publication *Why Didn't Zhuge Liang Build an FDE Organization?* convey the realization that "having the best individual and building the best organization are entirely different problems." As AI becomes universal, this realization will become increasingly important.

CEOs Kim Gap-yong and Shim Jae-woo of the Three Kingdoms AI Talent Research Institute are converting 20 years of classical accumulation into field knowledge for organizational design through Doyuan Gyeol Café in Ganghwa-gun, Incheon, and building an AI-era future talent platform connecting publishing, YouTube, education, and exhibition.

For consultation, contact 010-2397-5734 or jaiwshim@gmail.com.

| Category | Doyuan Gyeol Café in Ganghwado | Three Kingdoms TV (YouTube) | *Zhuge Liang FDE Organization* (Book) |
|----------|--------------------------------|---------------------------|---------------------------------------|
| Strengths | Real artifacts, exhibitions, in-person experience, on-site relevance | No time/space constraints, broad access, storytelling | Conceptual systematization, deep theorization, archiving |
| Weaknesses | Regional limitation (Ganghwado), requires visit time | Screen learning limitations, possible depth constraints | One-directional learning, difficult immediate feedback |
| Considerations | Optimal for group workshops and corporate diagnosis | Optimal for individual autonomous learning and diffusion | Optimal as theory verification and organizational design reference |

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