According to reports, Erin Callan, the charismatic CFO of Lehman Brothers Holdings (NYSE: LEH) is out of a job. So is Lehman's chief operating officer, Joseph Gregory.

As Charlie Gasparino reported for CNBC, "Callan and Gregory are leaving the investment bank, which has been under fire from its weak earnings performance and speculation that it will need to raise billions in capital to stay afloat, has seen its shares under intense pressure." Reuters reports that Herbert McDade will succeed Gregory, and Ian Lowitt will take over for Callan -- will become a senior investment banker at Lehman. I will discuss this at noon on Fox Business.

The market seems to hate the news -- with Lehman shares down 7% in premarket trading. Will the people who replace Callan (Lowitt) and Gregory (McDade) be so much more talented that they can extricate Lehman from its short- and long-term problems? Who knows how deep its writedowns will be in its Level 3 assets or how it will make money in the future, given that its core business of asset-backed securities has dried up.

Maybe these ousters make it a more obvious acquisition target. But they just look like sacrificial lambs on CEO Dick Fuld's altar to me. And they signal very deep problems to investors.

[This post has been recently updated to add more information as it was reported]

Peter Cohan is President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter. He has no financial interest in Lehman securities.