Think about a financial trader (stock, commodities, etc) that place big, but risky, bets on their own initiative. The times we know about this sort of thing happening have all been disastrous to the companies they work at. Of course, what we hear about in this regard selects out all but the disasters (nature of news reporting)... and as far as I know were almost certainly not the de facto sanctioned actions of a bottom-up culture. But these cases of autonomy were anything but profitable.