For over eleven years at McKinsey & Company I led marketing and communications for its global macroeconomic think tank, then banking, then all of financial services. For five of those years I did it from Tel Aviv, where I built the Firm's Israel office communications function and raised its standing with Israeli business leaders, founders and investors. The job underneath the title never changed: take the best thinking in the building and make it land with the executives and investors who had to act on it, when the stakes were highest.
That instinct - finding the one idea that carries the weight - was formed long before McKinsey, in rooms where the stakes were just as real: as a special adviser in the UK government, in elected office, and on the boards of major institutions. Different worlds, one discipline: judgement under pressure, and a feel for what the people who decide actually need to hear.
When I left McKinsey, I wrote down what needed to be true about whatever came next: To play a part in the future of Israel. To be in-country regularly. To take everything my varied career has taught me about how companies persuade, and put it to the highest possible use for Israeli founders. To work with clients who inspire me, and who want to get this right. This practice is what those lines became.
I know the ecosystem from the inside, and I work mainly from outside it, in the rooms in London and New York where the capital, the customers and the coverage are won - and won in English. Those rooms are where my career has been spent. The vantage is deliberate.
My name is Matthew Cooke.
Why is my method called AlephBetShin?
The name is also personal and part of my own identity. AlephBetShin are the first letters of my Hebrew name, Evyatar ben Shalom.
אביתר בן שלום
The three letters carry the shape of the work and my method: Aleph is the beginning, the foundation. Bet is the house, the structure. Shin is the fire letter, divine inspiration, what compounds once the foundation and the structure are in place.
Most companies already have a thread running through them. It is just too often tangled, dull, and pulled in five directions at once. The job is never to invent a company's story, it’s to find the thread that is already there, straighten it, test it, and forge the one golden thread the whole team can hold. Uncovered, not invented. Distillation, not decoration.
My work ends where your execution begins. No production, no PR, no media buying, nothing to sell you once we get the story right. Because I have nothing else to sell you, you can trust that my only interest is uncovering the clearest, truest version of your company.
Why the Golden Thread?
“A successful book is not made of what is in it, but of what is left out of it.”
Mark Twain, letter to Henry H. Rogers, 1897