FORTUNE — It wasn't much of a honeymoon. Less than a year after Wal-Mart's new chief executive, Mike Duke, took control of the world's biggest company, he was faced with a not-so-little problem. Shortly before he became CEO in early 2009, Wal-Mart had announced, with great fanfare, Project Impact — a plan to freshen up the stores and make them a better place to shop. For the most part it worked pretty well. The stores were cleaner and brighter, the logo's blue and yellow color scheme was warmer and more appealing, and the company embraced a catchy new slogan: "Save money. Live better." Even the yellow smiley face was dropped in favor of a perky new "spark" resembling a twinkly star. Nice.
The only trouble was that customers were buying less stuff. Part of Project Impact's mission was to cut down on the number of items sold in the stores. Fewer products meant less clutter. But if you happened to be a fan of Wisk laundry detergent, for instance, you were flat out of luck. Customers were voting with their feet — sales at existing stores were down — and some of Wal-Mart's big suppliers were even less cheery. Says one executive: "What happened was, shoppers said, 'We love clean aisles.' But they stopped shopping there."
For a company Wal-Mart's size — for a company of any size, for that matter — Duke, 60, moved quickly. By March of this year he had started to bring back many of the products that had been dropped, including Wisk, and he eventually reassigned the chief of the U.S. stores division; another top executive, who had been brought in from archrival Target, left the company.
No wonder his predecessor CEO, Lee Scott, calls him "a doer."
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