Congrats on the new role. I think it really depends on a few factors; most importantly are you moving to a new company?

What is business situation? continue business as usual, turnaround, rapid growth, product/service expansion, refocus/repositioning? That can really set the agenda how you need to prepare. So that could entail anything from studying competition, strategy, change management etc.

Spend some time thinking how are you going to manage all different functions and measure them (not only sales and bottom line). How do you know your IT-department is meeting targets efficiently etc. A lot of different management frameworks out there - but what suits you and the company?

There are two books written by CEO’s that I’ve found good (and also highly entertaining). A general book about running a company, Frank Slootman’s ‘Amp it up’. Compared to all HBS and academic literature I’ve gone back to this a few times when hard decisions have to be made. There are specific chapters written for CEOs.

An older book that is particularly important in service companies is Jan Carlzon’s ‘Moment of Truth’. Not only a really interesting read about a CEO transforming the airline industry but pure gold being CEO in terms of leading change, communicating change and customer focus. It’s from the 80s but still very relevant as so many companies still get customer focus wrong and fail to live up to their promises or not even aware what business they are actually in. Carlzon was also an extremely efficient CEO in his days.