Atkinson also held a visiting professorship at Henley Management College for ten years and for shorter periods at other universities in Sweden, Austria and the United States.
These techniques were put to the test that year in a Granada Television World in Action programme in which Atkinson demonstrated how a speaker with no previous public speaking experience could be coached to win multiple rounds of applause and a standing ovation at the annual conference of the Social Democratic Party in the UK.
In 1985, Atkinson ran a seminar on speech writing at the White House during Ronald Reagan's Presidency.
From 1987 to 1999, Atkinson was an advisor and speech writer for the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Paddy Ashdown.
Ashdown has noted: "There was scarcely a single major speech, in my eleven years as leader of the Liberal Democrats that I made without benefiting from Max Atkinson’s personal advice and help."