The Giants hire Cubs assistant GM Scott Harris to take the GM role for San Francisco. Farhan Zaidi was serving both as president and GM.

I think it shows the evolution of front offices and how sophisticated and at times complex and involved running a baseball operations department is. I don’t necessarily view it as a fixed division of labor, where my job is going to be to handle these few things and the general manager is going to handle these others. It’s really about just sharing the load of managing the overall operation.

BleedCubbieBlue.com

So GM does not have the power it once did. I always worry a bit about organizations that add levels of bureaucracy. I saw this happening at ESPN my second year there, but then they started adding networks, so they actually need the additional managers. They were smart to get people in place before they were needed, giving those employee valuable experience. I can see where the GM job keeps getting more complicated, so the it splits into other positions. In the past, the field manager and the GM were sometimes the same person! So we don’t see player managers anymore, and soon we won’t see independent GMs anymore.