After almost four decades of exploring AV technology and sharing that knowledge with other members of the Pro AV industry, Joseph D. Cornwall, 64, retired in April 2023.
It didn't take.
Not completely, anyway. He's still teaching and he's an active member of AVIXA's Content and Learning Committee. "I've stopped working for money," he said. "Now I'm working for what matters."
[SCN Hall of Fame 2024: Lorne Trottier]
At this stage of his career, what matters most to Cornwall is helping individuals discover the Pro AV industry and build careers in it. He's focused mainly on onboarding and crossboarding efforts, which he thinks are the biggest hurdles the industry is currently facing.
The onboarding process is relatively straightforward: Find young people and get them interested in AV industry careers. But crossboarding is the process of finding professionals who already have a particular skillset, such as electricians, and recruiting them to use those skills to solve problems in the AV industry. Cornwall said the AV industry is "woefully unprepared" to leverage crossboarding efforts, but he's working to help change that.
Cornwall's AV career took root in high school when an English teacher took him on a tour of a college radio station. "I remember thinking I'll be talking about this stuff for the rest of my life," he said. It blossomed after a six-year career in the U.S. Army, when he began selling VCRs and other consumer electronics at a department store in Cincinnati in 1986. That experience led to his own home theater design business. From there, he became a Sony representative, which led to new opportunities in the broadcast and satellite industries.
When he's not busy being not quite retired, Cornwall fosters dogs for his local Humane Society and maintains his lifetime passion for fly fishing near his home near Tampa, FL.
Eventually, Cornwall found himself working as a business development manager for C2G, and thought the company was focusing on the wrong product set and market application. In an effort to protect his own job, he admitted, Cornwall wrote a white paper in 2012, which was his way of identifying, for the company and their client base, five emerging technologies that would come to have the greatest impact on the AV connectivity business. Management read it, followed his advice, and subsequently enjoyed significant growth and market penetration. He was later named AV technology evangelist for the company.
[How BYOD Is Impacting Today's Conference Room Connectivity]
From selling customers their first VCRs to encouraging C2G's expansion into HDMI and USB-C cables, education has always been Cornwall's top sales technique. He realized his skillset was best deployed by communicating highly technical concepts in ways that people could understand. Over the past dozen years, he's taught and created dozens of training programs, and was named InfoComm Educator of the Year in 2014.
But the appeal of AV is about more than technology for technology's sake—it's about facilitating communication. "We all want to make a difference," Cornwall offered. "Everything that I do makes a difference because it lets other people communicate more efficiently. When a project is complete, I can see people benefitting from my work because of that ability to connect."
Cornwall acknowledged AI is the next big thing for Pro AV—but it's a tool, one that's come from outside of the industry. He said AV manufacturers and professionals need to learn how to use AI more efficiently and effectively. Plus, he said the industry has to do a better job embracing consumer features, particularly uncomplicated user interfaces, and incorporating them into commercial products and processes.
[SCN Hall of Fame 2024: Mario C. Educate]
"AV is not about video boxes, it's not about speakers," he explained. "AV is about an experience. We have to look at space, time, environment, content, and delivery, as well as the user experience—and that includes the control experience."
Borrowing from Joseph Campbell, Cornwall advised new AV professionals to follow their bliss. "There is no map for you," he said, "but that makes it so much more interesting. You can literally make your own road here and end up making a very fine living—but you have to be brave enough to rely on yourself. Find out what tickles your funny bone and chase that."
