For over 11 years at McKinsey & Company I led marketing and communications for our global macroeconomic think tank, banking and then all of financial services. For five 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 enable the partnership to 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.
I founded AlephBetShin to bring that to Israeli founders. 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 AlephBetShin?
The name is personal. AlephBetShin are the first letters of my Hebrew name, Evyatar ben Shalom.
אביתר בן שלום
The three letters also 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