• Fast Company, Wednesday, July 8, 2009 10:32 AM

Throw out any preconceptions you have about Julie Roehm and read Danielle Sacks' profile of the former svp of marketing communications for Wal-Mart, who is now 38 and more than two years out from the "litigious spiral of soap-operatic proportions" that followed her dust-up on marketing's Main Street. The restless Roehm, who still resides in Bentonville, Ark., with her husband and two sons, actually cuts a sympathetic figure as she doles out cookies to her kids, lays her head on the steering wheel of her hubby's minivan and yawns, "This is why I could never do this. I'd go nuts."

Roehm's consulting business picked up nicely last year despite the recession -- and no wonder, what with all of the encomiums from former colleagues and bosses sprinkled into Sacks' piece. Wal-Mart's culture, and the oppressive grip it casts on the Bentonville citizenry, does not fare as well.

Roehm, Sacks writes, "is taking on the most challenging rebranding campaign of her career: herself." "If I'm going to be stuck with this scarlet letter," Roehm says, "I'm going to dress it up and make it the prettiest damn scarlet letter I can possibly make it."

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